Self-Portrait with Blade of Grass

A letter, handwritten. Dated 10/3/94 in the righthand corner. Written in all caps. Like I’m shouting at her. HI MOM! IT’S YOUR FAVORITE SON HERE. GUESS WHERE I AM AS I’M WRITING THIS? COME ON, GUESS! You don’t have to guess. I will tell you. I was on campus. Scrawled CSULB GRASS in the top margin. Underlined it with a blade of grass. Which I tugged out from the lawn, upper quad. Affixed it to the letter with clear tape. It was green then, thirty some years ago. Its color now replaced by the gray of decades. I want you to imagine it green. See me handing the letter to my father. For him to mail to Santiago, Chile. Where she is visiting her parents. Her childhood home.

~

A girl when she saw it. Her father beating her mother. With an umbrella. With whatever object was near him. She fled the house whenever it happened. Down to the riverbank. To pick blackberries. To eat them whole. One after another.

~

My letter reaches her. Weeks go by. She flies back home. Here, California. She keeps the letter safe, in her personal collection. Years pass. My sister moves to Florida. My brother moves to Florida. The gray creeps into my parents’ hair. I meet Lisa. We fall in love. Tells me she was hit by a car. Only six years old. Almost died. I kiss her scars. Move into her apartment. I publish my first book. My parents rent a U-Haul and head east. Join my siblings at the other end of the country. My mother takes the letter with her. Years pass. I publish more books. The gray creeps into all of us.

~

My mother gets sick. I fly out to Florida with Lisa. My brother picks us up from the airport. Twilight as we drive. The sky nectarine to the west. I’m not so much moving through the world as the world moves around me. Their house approaches. Carpeted hallway slides beneath my feet. Into their bedroom. The bed, empty. I wonder where she is. In a chair beside the bed. I don’t recognize her. The oxygen machine whooshes. I bend down and hug her. “David,” she says. Touches my cheek. Her skull’s structure, clear beneath her face. I sit beside her. Minutes pass. On her nightstand is a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. A bookmark between pages twelve and thirteen. She won’t finish it, I think. I hold the slim novel in front of her. “This is why I’m a writer and professor,” I say. “I don’t understand,” she says, face creasing with puzzlement. The oxygen machine sounds like the ocean breathing. I lean in close to her ear. “Because you read, I read. Because I read, I wrote.” She lays her hand in the middle of her chest. “What an honor,” she says. Some moments she is lucid. Some she hallucinates. The next visit she stares off into the distance. “O, little girl,” she says. “What girl?” I ask. She turns to me. Shrugs.

~

Four days later she dies. I take time off from teaching. Go back to campus. Cross the lawn, the one from where I had pulled the blade of grass. Walk into class. My student Brisa reads her poem. She is in a grocery store with a friend. Runs into her ex’s new girlfriend. Admits to herself how pretty the new girlfriend is. That she still loves her ex. She tells the class she wrote the first draft after it happened. On her phone. In the parking lot of the grocery store, weeping. While her friend was consoling her. I quote Robert Frost: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” “Brisa,” I say, “Frost didn’t mean actual tears while you write.” The class laughs. “How did you do that?” I ask. “I don’t know,” she says. “I just did.”

~

It’s been seven weeks since my mother passed. I haven’t been able to write a poem. I offer this to you instead. The blade is gray. Almost silver. The letter ends like this: I MISS YOU! THE HOUSE GETS SO QUIET SOMETIMES AND . . . IT’S MISSING YOU. TAKE CARE. I HOPE YOU’RE HAVING FUN IN CHILE! I see her running from her home. Down to the riverbank. Toward the blackberries. Eating them whole. One after another. Straight from the vines. Her fingertips turning blue. O, little girl. Where did you go?