Tough, Old Birds
My mother raised me on
a healthy diet of irreverence
each time she raised one arm
to shake a fist at the wind,
threw her head back
into a cackle
and laughed, entirely,
before it broke apart into a cough.
She’d pat her chest
with the palm of her other hand
until the fit passed.
I’m a tough, old bird,
she’d say, once she caught
her breath, and look at me across
the bridge of her crooked nose,
twinkling out a grin
to prove she knew
what tough really was.
That’s the stock she came from,
a line of tough, old birds
going back to before the turn
of the last century, beginning
with my great-grandmother, who
managed a life of such mythic
proportions I actually believed
she had at one time been the Queen
of England, whenever I found myself
seated before her at Grandma’s
kitchen table, poised with such posture
my back took on the outline
of the waning moon.
Now act like you’re
having tea
with the queen,
the other tough birds would tell me.
Sit up straight, don’t
slurp,
place you napkin
across your lap –
the rules so plentiful I couldn’t hang on
and felt them leak from my head, so
I would tilt toward them in my chair,
hoping to scoop them back up
with my ear canal.
Grandma Thompson, the Queen’s
representative, would sit across from me
twinkling that familial characteristic,
we co-conspirators, waiting
for the end of tea time, so we could play hide
and seek, where she would transform back
into my great-grandmother
as I found easy hiding places
for her to find me in, and lift me from, wriggling
and laughing as she tickled my squirming
sides until I couldn’t breathe.
She taught me laughter isn’t real
until it has to rip itself from you.
And the third, my grandmother,
the toughest bird,
the softest,
who could dig a worm to bait a hook
to catch a fish to clean and cook
and feed us with, who can still fill a house
with the gravel ghost of her voice,
who couldn’t sit to watch a hockey game,
but stood in sturdy, hard-soled house slippers
stamping them faster the closer her team
got to the opposite net, bent near double, leaning,
straining toward the television,
stamping like her feet had skates, stamping
and calling out, her body coiled
like the tape on the end of a hockey stick
ready to cheer or yell or laugh.
She had an ear for language
an eye for style
and a taste for English tea in fine, bone china
but could still, on a warm,
summer night at the lake
pack us in pajamas into the back
of her baby blue Crown Victoria
and take us to the dump
to watch the bears eat garbage.
The line of birds has come down to me.
A mantle passed too soon,
their great lives in tiny shoes
far too big to fill. One day, not now,
but many years away,
shaking one fist at the sky, or laughing
until it rips apart my body or stamping,
stamping my feet in hard-soled
shoes like a living room Titan,
perhaps I’ll know what they knew,
maybe the unspoken knowledge
that passed through each of them will
trickle down and I, too, will look long
across the bridge of my nose, recovering
from my cackle-to-a-cough laughter
and say,
I’m a tough, old bird
and twinkle, proving I know
what tough really is.
© 2011 Ellen Kartz
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