“After the Wake, Gramma Ruth Communes with Her Beloved,” a poem by Ellen Kombiyil.
A butterfly; lost wishes.
“It didn’t flare like tissue or burn to ash but hovered many minutes …”
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After the Wake, Gramma Ruth Communes with Her Beloved
1.
“There in a jar, emptied of buttons —
mama put a butterfly
-
after she flew it inside a warm oven.
It didn’t flare like tissue or burn to ash
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but hovered many minutes before falling
heavy toward the rack, wings
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the color of peacocks, green & black dots,
spotted head & looped proboscis.
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I’d wanted to stroke it, I think, the day
I laid mama to rest, legs like bent sticks
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perfect with bristling stillness
as if sealed in a gift shop paperweight.
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When I tilted it toward the rim — foot-caught
then sprung — it lurched
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as if alive again, then dust-ruined, stained
the linoleum. I scoured the oven
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needing to rid it of all the lost wishes
baked into birthday cakes devoured since.
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Mama taught me thrift, how not to want.
Each year she lit an extra candle for luck.
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2.
“Remember when we met — I wore a pea
green dress, my hair sprayed with Aqua Net.
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Mama had no pearls to lend me
& I’d taken down the hem myself.
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In the throes of summer, beyond the baby oaks,
your caged tomatoes still grow, although no one
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tends them. How you hated those store-bought pink discs,
refusing also mushrooms in your meat sauce
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because you don’t pay money for fungus!
It’s gone now, the hutch you made for the chickens,
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wood latch grooved with your thumbprint,
wire mesh dented where you leaned against it.
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Oh, Russ, you could fix anything
except the kitchen clock always did run slow.
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I’d be sifting flour for pound cake,
you’d be hollerin Ruth, c’mon let’s go
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and I’d rush flour-coated, hair falling in wisps,
get on a good dress, shoes, hose, my coat
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hung in the hall closet like forever,
you in the car fuming we’re going to be late
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for heaven’s sake, the cake half-risen on the counter.
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Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIALOGIST, The Moth, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and The Offing. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. She is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora.
