Mother In A Window Poem by Charles Eastland

MOTHER IN A WINDOW

I see my mother across the Sunday quiet avenue
lost in a plastic chair with sun lighting her pretty
mess numbed in a house dress showing pale skin
her face and legs bare and shapely in a hangover

her brightness faded in a daze and flower pattern
of her shift, the blood stains bled through plump
bandages on her wrists in this morning's picture
hinting at the drunk cursing face clawing night
before over the cigarette burned whiskey sticky
Formica table where Lord Calvert 86 Proof ruled
the cruel kitchen weekend nights with mother the
ringmaster directing the long bloody night circus
of the damned and deformed spirits spewing abuse
most foul on my big gentle step dad longshoreman
of the hard sweaty eighteen hour shifts in the dank
holes of freight ships long before containers Big Mike
Dembia sucked down a raw egg and went to work at
Hoboken or New York docks of eighteen hour shifts

the sun don't lie now or then in windows of memory
I'm seeing mother's platinum bleached blond dried
out transparent hair coifed and teased like cotton
candy hinting of strawberry that she was last month
as the hot redhead who loved drinking and sex more
than cooking or cleaning anything else except herself
immaculately sexy though she loved her mirror most

in which she perfected the near Marilyn image
that was a good model for curves of a still
young hot bod at twenty-eight then in the 50's
and considering this older son at the window
is twelve years alive and very old with life's
mold already forming today's privileged man

Charles Eastland

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