For Susan, Our Tender Of Maple Shades Poem by Denis Mair

Susan stayed at the epicenter
Weathered the historical storms
That blew our family out of Ohio.
Susan tended the GENIUS LOCUS
That used to haunt our backyard
Learning to divine it with nuance and line
In the watercolors she never gave up.
Susan watched through flurries of newsprint
As people died in our hometown;
She immersed her voice in Ohio vowels,
Workaday twang that speaks of my youth,
Susan is our thread back home.
My first impossible girlfriend
Went to Susan after being dumped,
Being drawn by our family's penchant
Of exclaiming over bright pictures
We loved to project in our heads,
But being who she was could not avail,
Needing to pour her gouts of need
On Susan's sympathetic ear.
Ten years later, Susan was there again
Making a place for her little niece;
She enrolled Rebecca in school
And carted her to piano class;
Rebecca stayed for weeks and months,
Getting a taste of stable home life;
Even the Easter bunny of Rebecca's childhood
Lived in a backyard hutch for ten years.

I remember when Susan was a young wife,
Mother took me on a trip to Marietta
For a survey of domestic arrangements:
The attic flat before Rhett was born
With Dick off to work each day at the chemical plant.
There were many sights to wonder at:
The serpent-mounds next door, the moored riverboat
A manorial island reclaimed by thick woods,
Most of all- -my sister being attached.
This was a mystery that outdid
The slow-turning catfish of the riverbank.
They must owe each other something, I thought
But I couldn't put my finger on it.