The Captive Fire

While I was writing the screenplay My Second Simone and developing the stage play Addah Belle’s Pocketwatch, I was consumed with the fires we all go through. I remembered the irony of this old poem I wrote about my mom. I say, “She would give a breast to be needed that way again,” and about a year after I wrote it, she had her left breast removed. I implored her to stop taking me so literally…

The Captive Fire

She tosses the yarn
and the kittens roll with it,
hitting the wall at the
propane heater,
its grill a cage for
the captive fire within.

She lets out a smile
but it swings back to her,
on a pendulum,
like a good smile,
contained in quiet play.

In the span of a sigh
the kittens will leave, cats,
echoes of the children
who fell, men and women,
from her breast.
She would give a breast
to be needed
that way again.

She snatches the yarn
and the kittens
settle for her shoelace
as she finishes the fringe
on her fourth grandson’s afghan.
Muted shades of
red, orange and yellow.

—WT

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Addah Belle’s pocket watch stands open
on my desk like a sandwich board
advertisement.

I want to shrink down and crawl under it,
camping in my ticking tent. Constellations and
bug spray.

Addah Belle knew me. She could
look at me and tell. She could tell my
future. In her time women married.

Addah Belle chose door number two
and taught at a girls’ finishing school,
finishing them off for marriage.

Retirement came abruptly. Bourbon and
ceremonies. The stillness of her room
in the farmhouse. And no Marion.

Two twin beds, like a dormitory, and her
married sister downstairs and grandkids on
long weekends.

So I, her grand niece, tracked in
with pocket frogs, too-close best
friends and notebooks. She noticed.

Mom cut my unattended hair short.
Strangers took me for a boy. A boy
with notebooks. Listening to Auntie.

And the pocket watch tent would ticka tick,
flashlights and ghost stories on her desk while
she advised I could be a writer, plan a career.

In her time pocket watches were for men.
That might be how it came to her. Tom,
the last at bat who walked home

lost, wondering why she wouldn’t
marry him, why remaining at school with
Marion was preferable. The watch

forgotten on a wash stand, a library shelf,
a parlor bridge table. Tempus abire tibi est.        [It’s time for you to go away]
But the watch she kept and wound, for the sound.

I was a writer when she died.  I was a lesbian when
I found her love letters. I hope I am memory as I ticka
tick away at a career, our career.

Tempus vitam regit.            [Time rules life]

—WT

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