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Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.
Hello, and welcome to our third week of Follow A Fish poetry podcasts. We're going to explore poems written and read by Deborah Deborah Backel Schmidt and me, Sue Boudreaux, in conversation with each other. And then we'll invite you to write to this week's prompt, grief, seen up close and afar. Today, we have two poems, both about mothers declining, with Deborah's canning apricots and a listener's Pete Brown's Two Ladies. Tomorrow will be The Toll by me, with a longer lens on grief.
Deborah:Hi. This is Deborah, and I'm going to read my poem, Canning Apricots. Slowly, one beloved layer at a time, I was losing my mother. Still, as long as I could rescue her from confusion, as long as she was safe, I would find a way for her to stay in her own home. So she searched for things mislaid, spoiled her big golden dog, plied her guests with tea and chocolate, and went to the grocery store.
Deborah:A lot. Her pantry shell was filled with yellow boxes of cornstarch, enough for a Chinese restaurant, and little red cans of tomato paste, enough to make marinara long after she was gone. And next to these rose jar after glowing jar of apricot halves. Somehow, even though keys and calendars defeated her, her hands remembered how to put up fruit, and she would not let the bounty of her trees fall unharvested. It was as if the essence of her loving, capable nature had been preserved behind glass with the radiant summer sweetness of those blenems.
Deborah:I would keep the last of the jars as long as I could.
Sue:Deborah, thank you for that beautiful poem. I love the way that it just sounds so kind and accepting of the creep of dementia in your beloved mother. I particularly love the legacy she leaves of apricots and the allegory of apricot canning, the glow, the sense of memory, and the time preserved. My favorite lines are about when she went to the grocery store a lot, and it kind of surprised me that that was the first, premonition that something is really wrong. And I loved the next to these rose jar after glowing jar of apricot halves.
Sue:And I loved that her hands remembered how to put up fruit, and she would not let the bounty of her trees fall unharvested. And I really relate to that. I have an apricot tree too. And then I love in your final stanza, the radiant summer sweetness, and also that you would keep those jars as long as you could. I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about your mother before her memory started to fade.
Deborah:I guess you never met her, did you, Sue?
Deborah:No. Yeah. She was already fading before you moved here. I was so in love with her. She was just a radiant, energetic person.
Deborah:She loved children. It was her life's mission to be an advocate for early childhood education. She taught preschool teachers, she worked in the Monterey Bay Area. And then when she became a grandmother, she was just the most amazing grandmother. Would show up every visit with her arms full of gifts and just be ready to be so present with my kids, just the way she had been with me as a kid.
Deborah:I think I was really lucky that she didn't work for a large portion of my childhood. So she was just there and just so much fun. Yeah. It was really hard to lose her. We always thought that we'd have her into her eighties.
Deborah:And it was a real blow to lose her little by little. I think it's one of the hardest ways
Sue:to lose someone. Oh, yes. Yes. I think we share that because my mother also had a decline, which was also tragic. I love your description of your mother.
Sue:I wonder, you're a grandmother yourself now. Does who she is carry forward into your grandmothering? I hope so. I know I'm not her,
Deborah:and sometimes I do compare myself in terms of gift giving. I'm not the person walking through the door with parcels. But I love being with the little ones. I think what I aspire to is that quality of being so present, there to listen and to be pulled by the hand through the door or out the door into the next little adventure.
Sue:I was wondering if, when you wrote this, was it in the thick of your mother's illness or afterwards? It was shortly after. It was around the time that she died. I can't remember the exact year.
Deborah:It was remembering the process of losing her, but I still, at the point of writing, had apricots on my shelves.
Sue:Do you now? No. Did you eat them for special occasions? Yes.
Deborah:I was worried that we couldn't keep them forever because even though I knew that her hands remembered how to do it, I didn't know, you know, there's such a thing as botulism and didn't take chances. But, yeah, we kept them for, like, dessert on top of some amazing rice pudding that her granddaughter made for Christmas Eve, that kind of thing.
Sue:Oh, that sounds so good, and I'm sure she'd have loved that. How did she cope with losing memory?
Deborah:You know, for the most part, after the initial shock and desperation, I think we were lucky in a sense that she was diagnosed so late that within a few hours of being diagnosed, she had forgotten. And at first, I thought it was my duty to remind her, but that was a horrible idea, actually. And so when I learned that, that I could just be with her in the present and she didn't have to know what was happening with her, then she was actually pretty happy as a person, still very involved in the moment to moment of life. As she lost her layers, what she was paring down to was pure heart. That's what she was in the end.
Sue:That's such a beautiful way of putting it. It makes me feel incredibly sad. And yet, that's kind of a blessing too, in a I was wondering if we go back to sort of the mechanics in some ways of writing this poem. Did this come to you mostly complete, or did you write it over time? Did you edit it?
Deborah:It was mostly fairly complete. I don't keep drafts of my bones, but a lot of them do arrive pretty recognizable. I think because they just stay off of the paper. Before I go to the paper, there's a lot of thinking and rearranging, rehearsing, playing lines off against each other, rearranging in my head before I go to write it down. And then there is a process even after that of editing and moving stuff around and generally making things more concise and making sure that the language really pops.
Deborah:You know, asking myself, have I said this before? Is there a better way to say this?
Sue:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Deborah:Looking for images that are bright and focused. Do you read it out loud?
Sue:I do. Do you read it to somebody or read it to yourself?
Deborah:Just out loud to myself.
Sue:Who do you choose to share it with?
Deborah:Daniel, more often just the two writing groups that I'm involved with,
Sue:which is super useful because I always hear things. It's amazing how you can I'm always looking for something that sounds dumb, and I really can't put my finger on anything more than that. And it is incredibly helpful to have a listener who is a kind of a kind critic, not somebody who's going to be a jerk about it, but somebody who wants you to succeed. Someone who will actually engage.
Deborah:Yes, someone whom you trust as listener, who really understands your voice and what it is that you are saying, who really gets you. I think it just helps you be more yourself on paper.
Sue:So I guess to listeners, be careful who you ask to read or to listen to your poetry, don't my finding is that if I ask somebody to read a poem and they don't get back to me, I never follow-up, because that may mean either they're not interested, they didn't like it, and it would hurt my feelings.
Deborah:It would be really awkward. Or if you engage with them over the poem and you come away feeling at all hurt or shut down, just don't go back. There's no reason to. There's so many people out there that would love what you're doing. I think we all need that.
Deborah:I just am not a believer in these high powered, super critical writing workshops. I haven't heard of one person that actually benefited from that.
Sue:Right. Because this is not a competitive sport. Tell me, what do you hope listeners and readers come away with? And by the way, I should mention that we also publish these on our website, is at curiositycatpodcasts.com. And so you can see the artwork that's associated, but you can also see how it's laid out on the page, which I think is quite important to the full experience of a poem.
Sue:Yeah. But what would you like readers and listeners to come away with?
Deborah:Certainly, if it hits home for you in terms of having experienced such a loss yourself, I'm I'm more sorry than I can say. But I also am really happy to have that deep connection. And if it's not territory that you've journeyed through, but it gives you some compassion for those who are going through it on either side, then I think that's a real plus too. Thanks, Deborah.
Sue:I'm going to reread Deborah's poem, Canning Apricots. Slowly, one beloved layer at a time, I was losing my mother. Still, as long as I could rescue her from confusion, as long as she was safe, I would find a way for her to stay in her own home. So she searched for things mislaid, spoiled her big golden dog, plied her guests with tea and chocolate, and went to the grocery store a lot. Her pantry shelves filled with yellow boxes of cornstarch, enough for a Chinese restaurant, and a little red cans of tomato paste, enough to make marinara long after she was gone.
Sue:And next to those rose jar after glowing jar of apricot halves. Somehow, even though keys and calendars defeated her, Hans remembered how to put up fruit, and she would not let the bounty of her trees fall unharvested. It was as if the essence of her loving capable nature had been preserved behind glass with the radiant summer sweetness of those blenoms. I would keep the last of the jars as long as I could. Today we're going to share the first of a listener's poems that was submitted, and it is a segue to Deborah's poem.
Sue:It's called Two Ladies, and it's by my friend Pete Brown, who lives in the North Of England. He writes, Two ladies. What's left of her looks right through the chair, as though she sees no one or not her son. Her indifference stabs me, there with shame for all the times I did the same to her. Too late, I hate myself and hope.
Sue:Her hands twist, the kaleidoscope behind her eyes rearranges shattered shards of a life revised. Her restless mind grabs rag bag words, two babies, two ladies. She pouts and grins, scolds children I can't see, maybe me. A sudden sunlit fish, the past crosses her mind, then wriggles away. She giggles while I wish and grieve.
Sue:Each time I leave, I think, if I never see her again, maybe I'll remember who she was, not who she has become. I learned to let her be, not to yearn or turn back time, looked forward to what days there were as intimate strangers hand in hand, and guilt lifted, anger evaporated, peace and reconciliation descended. Then she became the nearly departed, lost in limbo, draped in bedsheet shrouds, flesh melting from her lovely bones. Day after night, we longed for life to leave her, for the means to send her gently on her way, but we didn't have the heart. Hers beat a driver's drum, dumb lungs dragging ragged breaths in and in, a dogged life force programmed the way past reason to survive.
Sue:In the end, of course, we were not there, that's just too pat. She left alone, a shell bereft of mind and beached beyond our reach. Now still, after all, she remains the mum who lived for us, her boys, who could have loved her better, but could not have loved her more. And Pete says that he wrote this after he overheard his mother say to her carer, He's a very nice man, but I don't know who he is. Even as she referred to her little boys.
Sue:You can see pictures of Pete at four years old and his present self, as well as this poem written out on our website.
Deborah:Today's prompt is grief. You can respond in any way it strikes you. Maybe set a timer for ten minutes and writing anything at all. All words welcome. Then read back and switch your brain to editing mode to see if something interesting has swum up from your subconscious.
Deborah:Take a chance and send it to us at curiositycatpodcastgmail dot com. Unlike the usual publisher black hole, we will respond with some specific positive feedback, and we'll read the best ones on an upcoming podcast, and or send us a voice recording as a .wav file. Our next podcast will be Sue's poem on grief, the toll, this time on the loss of a seventh grade student of hers. Please check out the written poems with added artwork on our website at curiositycatpodcasts.com. It's linked in our show notes.
Deborah:And, of course, please rate and review us. And of course, subscribe and share this with your friends. Looking forward to hearing from you.