III: Snapshots

Pity the woman whose son appreciates suffering.
I still have photos of my mother, her head bent in despair.
I took them. Why couldn't I see
the pangs of human waste flickering there?

Fire can't seal the soul as surely as cold
can and my grandmother's hate was glacial,
implacable, numb.
To a child, a parent's parent must seem mythic.
From where else could such power laid over power come?

And I can feel the ripples of my mother's mother's cold
pulse through me like a radiation
corrupting and bursting cells.

My mother sits before us
nearly seventy and shivering on the edge of tears.
Her words are clear, as hard and clear as ice.
The spectrum of her life is focussed into white.
I hear the child demand with fierce reason,
how can a mother be so frozen,
storming and distant, season to season?
How can she allow an innocence to settle into fear?

and why am I before my son,
alone and old,
responsible,
abandoned here?