The Poem I Retired After One Hundred Readings
It earned its rest; we had both stopped meaning it the same way.
I retired a poem this spring the way you retire a racehorse: publicly, gently, and a good two years too late. It was called "Rosewater," it was twenty-two lines long, and I read it aloud, by my own count, exactly one hundred times.
I know the number because of the tally marks. They live in the back of a green notebook, four little strokes and a slash, row after row, like a prisoner's wall. I started keeping them after reading number seven, the night a stranger in a knit cap came up before I had even gotten to the mic and asked, "Are you doing the mother one?"
The mother one.
I wrote "Rosewater" when I was twenty-six, in the eight weeks after my mother's stroke, mostly in the parking garage of St. Anne's because I could not cry in the ward and would not cry in front of my father. It is about her relearning words. About the afternoon she pointed at a spoon for a full minute, furious, her mouth opening and closing, and finally said, "the small silver. The soup hand." About how she called me by my uncle's name for a month and I answered to it, because being someone was better than watching her find no one.
The first time I read it, at a library open mic with eleven people and a table of unsold jam, a man in the back cried into his sleeve and then shook my hand too long. I drove home feeling like a struck bell.
So of course I read it again... And again.
It became the poem people requested, the one organizers mentioned in emails, the one that made strangers tell me about their own mothers in the signing line, which is the real payment in this business and everyone knows it.
A hospice nurse once told me she kept a photocopy folded in her locker. You do not retire a poem like that. You would sooner retire your own hand.
Here is what nobody warns you about a signature poem: somewhere around the fortieth reading, you stop performing the poem and start performing the memory of the first reading. I knew where the room would go quiet, two lines before the spoon. I knew to slow down on "the soup hand." I had developed, God forgive me, a head tilt.
The poem had become a small reliable machine, and I was its operator, and the grief in it was a recording of a recording of a thing that had once been a live wire in my chest.
And while the poem stood still, my mother did not.
She got better... Not movie better, but better. Speech therapy twice a week for three years, a stubbornness that frightened her therapists into excellence. She took up swimming at sixty-eight because a pamphlet said it helped, and then kept swimming because she liked flirting with the lifeguard. She critiques my beard. She beats my father at rummy and gloats in full sentences.
The woman in "Rosewater" never does any of that. The woman in "Rosewater" is forever in that kitchen, pointing at a spoon she cannot name.
My mother had never once come to a reading. She said poetry rooms smelled like wet coats, which is true. But last October, reading number ninety-four, a festival two towns over, my father drove her without telling me, and I looked up in the middle of the second stanza and saw her in the fourth row with her hands folded like a woman at a sentencing.
I do not remember the rest of the set.
In the car afterward she was quiet for a long time... Then she said, "You do that very well." And then, looking out the window, "But that woman never gets better, does she. Every time you read it, you put her back in that kitchen, and she never finds the word."
Every time you read it, you put her back in that kitchen, and she never finds the word.
I started to defend myself. I told her about the man in the sleeve, the nurse and her locker, all the strangers it had held a light for. She let me finish. My mother lets you finish the way a cliff lets you run.
"It helped you once too," she said. "That was the version of you I liked reading it." Then, softer, patting my knee like I was the one recovering from something: "Write me swimming."
Readings ninety-five through ninety-nine felt like visiting a grave with a script. I watched myself do the head tilt. I heard the room hush at the spoon and felt... nothing but the hush itself, the way a waiter feels a busy Friday. I had read an essay once about why safe poems lose, why the work goes dead the moment it stops costing you anything, and I had nodded along like it was about other people. It was about a man with a green notebook and a tally wall.
The truth I finally said out loud, to my kitchen, at one in the morning: the poem was no longer a memory. It was a taxidermied animal I kept insisting was asleep.
My mother had done the harder, less quotable work of healing, and I had been standing in dim rooms for six years telling strangers she was still broken, because broken was the version of her that made them cry, and making them cry was the version of me I knew how to be.
So I gave it a hundredth reading and told the room what it was.
A small night, twenty people, a bookshop that lights an actual candle on the counter after dark. I said, "This is the last time I will read this poem, because the woman in it got better and one of us should admit that." A few people laughed, unsure. I read it slowly, no tilt, and for the first time in years it moved through me instead of past me, because it had finally become what it always should have been: not a bulletin, but a goodbye. Grief for the year the poem came from, and for the twenty-six-year-old in the parking garage, and for my uncle's name in her mouth.
Then I pulled out a new page, still soft from folding, and read "Backstroke."
It is about my mother swimming. It is about her white cap in lane three, her mouth breaking the surface for air and coming back down with a word in it every time. It is not a good poem yet. I lost the rhythm in the middle, and a man in the front row laughed at a line I had not meant to be funny, and then I realized it was funny, she is funny, and the laugh belonged in there.
It wobbled like a foal.
It was alive.
Afterward the bookseller blew out the candle and asked, a little mournfully, if I would ever do the mother one again, and I said the mother one had just happened, sir, you were in the room for it.
At home I opened the green notebook and drew the hundredth mark, the long slash across the four standing strokes, closing out the row. My mother asked to hear "Rosewater" one more time that Sunday, privately, at her own kitchen table, the actual kitchen, the actual spoons in the actual drawer. She listened with her eyes shut... At the end she corrected me.
"It wasn't rosewater on the counter that day," she said. "It was orange blossom. You never could tell them apart."
One hundred readings, and the poem had one more revision in it after all.
The notebook stays on my shelf, tally wall and everything. I go to the pool on Tuesdays now and sit in the humid bleachers with a different notebook, watching lane three, writing down what the water does when it has finally stopped being news.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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