The Succession of Mothers
“Take this,” a man resembling,
from a distance, my long-dead grandfather,
bellowed on the corner of Boylston
and Tremont, his breath holding
on the winter air like exhaust
from the smokestacks and chimneys
I observed each day, turn of a new century,
through the graffitied windows
of an Orange Line subway car
that trembled and shook
from Sullivan Square to my Chinatown stop,
the man’s middle finger sprung
like a switchblade at protestors
on the opposite curb as he stammered,
“and send it to ya motha!”
his other hand holding fast
to the ball end of a weathered cane,
the city in turmoil, though I do not recall
now with which sides the individuals
aligned, only that some of the protestors
glared at the man and others laughed,
most likely at his impotent rage
or the thought, literal, of his photograph
arriving in their mothers’ mail,
his voice recorded on a cassette tape
turned back and forth in the gray light
of Medford or Charlestown, the first package
these mothers had received in months
or even years from children long-grown
and lost to the world, or so the mothers
had thought, one mother in this succession
of mothers receiving, in my imagination,
the man’s actual finger, not severed
or taken by force, but surrendered
to the crowd through which he passed,
the finger slipped from the man’s hand
like the magic trick all fathers employ,
the finger disappearing in the moment
and not returned, destined or cursed
to travel from home to home,
like the duffle bag, all fuchsia and turquoise,
that my wife and her family received
for one week each year when she was a child,
the bag containing a statute of Our Lady of Fatima,
arriving, or so I choose to believe, on their porch
in a flurry of wind and with a sound like a knock
at the door, though they couldn’t be sure,
and what else could they do but take her in,
my wife and her sisters attending, placing
the statue on their cleared foyer table,
unpacking and positioning her crown, her hands
extended in welcome, revealing her pierced
and thorn-encircled heart, its sacred form
capped with fire and emanating brushstrokes
of light, like the image of the sun spinning
in the sky on the VHS tape that came in the bag,
the image my wife says she remembers most,
as well as the story her school’s nuns told
of the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima appearing
to Pope John Paul II as he lay bleeding
in St. Peter’s Square, having been shot four times
by an attempted assassin, the Pope insisting
afterwards that the Blessed Mother redirected
the bullets away from his heart, a belief
he held so strongly that, when recovered,
he sought out her shrine and placed
one of the four bullets in her statue’s crown,
the bullet the size of a fingertip
and clean though having passed
through the meat of a man, a gift
I know from which I would recoil,
though what is a statute if not composed,
no different from those same mothers
who, each evening after Mass, still light
a candle in their shades-drawn homes
and say the Rosary for a wayward child,
their hands traversing from bead to bead,
reciting the prayers their own mothers prayed.
Jonathan Fink is professor and director of creative writing at University of West Florida. He is currently completing a new collection of poems, which includes “The Succession of Mothers” published here. More information about his writing and publications is available at jonathanfink.com.
Header photo by Immaculate, courtesy Shutterstock.
