Steven Schroeder | head and heart
Two things my mother told me
the day before she turned eighty four –
she woke up on her seventy second birthday
with “A Land Where We’ll Never Grow Old”
in her head and five years ago when we
thought she was going to die she
heard a song she did not know
playing again and again.
She could not call it to mind, but
I asked her to hum it if it comes back
to her and send me a recording
so I could write it down.
It will, but she won’t, because
she does not talk to machines.
Her heart doctor asked her if she remembered
when she was bleeding in the hospital and
she said no. She said she remembered
going in and she remembered
waking up: she asked
what that music was we’d been playing.
He thought she’d forgotten, but she told me
she wasn’t there. She was in that song,
and a doctor of the heart (of all
people) should understand
that. He asked about bleeding
because he was changing her medication,
but he had memory in mind, counting backward
from a hundred by threes or some such thing.
One would think where the heart was would matter
most for one who cares for them and what song
is in it when. She says she always has a song
in her head and had always wanted
to work in a flower shop and make hats.
My sister and I drove twenty four hours between us
to bake her a four layer lemon cake
with buttercream icing
and another day in opposite directions
back to our distant lives – and now
in the middle of it, a message on a machine,
word of another death in the family,
and I think I can hear that song.
from the moon, not the finger, pointing. Lamar University Literary Press | 2016
