CLOSING THE GATE ©

Last night I heard the angel sing.
His velcrose whisper softly stung
like a spider crawling in the hair
as I kneaded a widening tunnel
through wallpapered rooms, my heartbeats
pounding away thirty weed‑grown years.

Her eyes do twinkle, you know.
She is every inch the Swedish grandmother.
She wants to be in on every photo
smiling back, over the shoulders
of those standing in the doorway
smiling back, directly at me
smiling back, through the camera's eye
to the person I was then
as if to say: "See what I have grown?"
These weeds.

I have spent thirty years talking about
how she baked four loaves of bread
every morning of her life
to anyone who would listen.
But would they understand the way
the table shook
when white to her elbows with flour
she kneaded her memories into loaves?

Making bread was her one small rise:
it seemed she pounded away
the day the gate was left open.
It is written in family legend:
the last six cows bloated from alfalfa
and they lost the farm.
She never gave up kneading the bread
till grandpa died. Nor gave up loving
my mother, who had left open the gate.

Now more than the pastures are gone.
The brick house four‑square is gone.
It went the way of the gate
swinging open for anyone who walked
over the threshold.
It went the way
of my grandfather's favorite table trick.
As Gram Hilma chortled in a side‑glance
he would line up the peas on his knife
and roll them down his curled tongue
a neat trick that turns into slavering
as the years bloated to the eightieth gate.

After Grandma's funeral
I went the way of their farm
on the prairie,
but the search did not open the gate.

I have spent thirty years
trying to imagine how her life
was all 16‑year‑old hope
the day Hilma Berhardina Ruthstrom
first crept out of the house
to go riding in the buggy
with George Frederick Clausen.

I did find the grass ruts of "The Place."
It was up near Boelus, Nebraska,
over a grassy sandhill
awash with grass blades full of sweet peas
and wild beds full of yeasty, white flowers.
Of course, the buggy was gone.
It always is.

I remember the night she slept in anger
on the kitchen floor
while her iron poster rocked like the table
feathers flying up like flour. He had been
her youngest, hanging greedily on to her nipples
until he was two, hanging on now, slavering
with just as much blind suckle
to the hot bitch in his mother's bed
the one she had shared with Grandpa the 52 years
before he went to the home.


I remember their final days, with Grandpa
slavering all night about the stink
of the dead woman under his bed.

In the last week of his life
the nurses robbed him of his one small dignity:
his old‑manhood lay exposed, flaccid
as he curled on his side on the hospital bed.
We averted our gaze to stare
at our futures out the dusty windows
of the County Home at Kearney.

Couldn't they have tried to imagine when he
was all sweet peas lined up on a blade?

Grandma's eyes did laugh, you know.
Before that last time when
with her elbows strapped to the bed
she could not even imagine
the amazing grace of her yeast rising.
As we sang ". . . how sweet the sound"
we had to make the memories shake for her.

Maybe he had really seen
‑‑ horrifying thought ‑‑
the dead woman under the bed.

As for the hot bitch,
she had to pass through the gate
with a brain tumor.
There wasn't anyone sucking
on that cow's teats then.





*Thirty of the poems of the poetry
collection about Nebraska are published
in Closing the Gate, Nightshade Press, Troy, Maine, 1993.

“Two Brazen Hussies,” Dramatic Reading, Arne B. Larson Concert Hall
The Shrine to Music Museum, The University of South Dakota, Vermillion, 1994