My Grandmother Critiques My Metaphors
She can't read, but she listens hard and takes no prisoners.
My grandmother has never read a single word I have written, and she is the most feared editor I know.
She cannot read. This is not a tragedy she carries around; it is a fact she wields. School ended for her at nine years old, when her father decided that a girl who could count money and outstare a goat did not need the alphabet. She raised six children, buried a husband, ran a vegetable stall with the ruthlessness of a hedge fund, and arrived at eighty-one with the firm belief that words are things you say out loud, to a person's face, or not at all.
Which is why every poem I write must pass through the tribunal of her kitchen table.
The ritual is fixed. Two cups of over-sweetened coffee, hers and mine, on the table with the sunflower plastic cover. She sits with her hands folded like a judge who has already heard too many excuses today. I read aloud. She listens with her eyes closed, and I have learned that the eyes closing is not peace. It is a hawk conserving energy.
The first time I read her a poem, I was twenty-two and insufferable.
It was about the ocean. I had never lived near an ocean.
It had the word "cerulean" in it.
She let me finish. She took a sip of coffee... Then she said, in the dialect she saves for lies and salesmen, "Which sea? The one you saw on the television?"
I started to explain that it was a metaphor, that the sea stood for longing.
"If the sea is longing," she said, "then say longing. The sea is busy. It has fish."
I want to tell you I laughed it off... I went home and sulked for two days, the full sulk, with the dramatic staring out of windows. Then I reread the poem and understood, with the specific nausea of the correctly criticized, that she was right.
The poem was furniture. Nothing in it had ever happened to me.
So I started bringing her true things, and that is when she got dangerous.
I read her a poem about my grandfather's funeral, and she stopped me in the second stanza. "The shirt was blue," she said, eyes still closed. "You said white. He was buried in the blue one, the one with the missing button I never fixed. If you are going to open the coffin in a poem, open it properly."
The missing button she never fixed.
Forty years of marriage folded into a button. I stole the line, obviously. I am a poet, not a saint. When I read her the new version, button included, she was quiet for a long time... and then she said, "Better. Now it hurts." She said it the way other people say congratulations.
"Better. Now it hurts," she said, the way other people say congratulations.
Her critical vocabulary is small and absolute. A poem is either "true," "almost true," or "radio talk," which is her term for anything that sounds impressive and means nothing. Politicians are radio talk. Weather forecasts are radio talk. My early metaphors were, almost without exception, radio talk.
"The moon like a coin," I read once.
"A coin buys things," she said. "What does your moon buy?"
"Grief sat on my chest like a stone."
"Grief is not a stone. A stone you can throw. Try again."
I tried again for six years. Under her jurisdiction I learned more about metaphor than any workshop taught me, and I have taken the workshops, I have done the courses, I once spent actual money learning to write from people with published books and gentle voices. They taught me craft, and I am grateful. But none of them ever leaned across a table, tapped my notebook with one finger bent from decades of peeling vegetables, and said, "You are hiding behind the pretty part. Read me the line you deleted."
How did she know there was a deleted line? There is always a deleted line. She raised six children. She can smell a withheld truth through a closed door.
The deleted line, that time, was about my mother, her daughter, and the year we did not speak. I read it to her with my heart going like a trapped bird.
She opened her eyes for that one.
She looked at me for a long moment, two women on opposite sides of a woman we both loved, and she said, "That one you keep. That one you don't show your mother. That one is for the poem."
She understands, better than anyone with a degree, that family is the subject you write toward your whole life and never finish. She just refuses to let me write around it. Around is where the radio talk lives.
Last spring, something happened that I still turn over at night. I entered the button poem, the true version, into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so I could tell her I had done something with it besides read it to her kitchen. It placed... Not first, but it placed, with my grandfather's blue shirt and the button she never fixed printed under my name where strangers could see it.
I brought her the news and my phone, and I read her the comments strangers had left when the poem went up on a community wall for poets. A man in another country wrote that he had gone to his closet and found his own father's shirt and sat down on the floor of his bedroom. I translated it for her twice because she made me repeat it.
She was quiet... Then she took my phone, held it upside down, studied the letters she has never been able to read, and handed it back.
"So the button traveled," she said.
I said yes. The button traveled.
"Good." She refilled my coffee without asking, which is her language for love, and then, because she is who she is, she added, "The second stanza is still slow. Fix it before more strangers see."
People ask me sometimes, at readings, who my influences are, and I say the names you are supposed to say. It is a kind of lie. My influence is eighty-one years old, cannot write her own name, and can locate the false note in a metaphor from across a kitchen, blindfolded by her own closed eyes.
She will not be at the readings. She does not travel, and she considers microphones a form of showing off. But every poem I read into one has already survived the sunflower table, the cooling coffee, the long silence, the verdict.
Some nights I write a line I know is radio talk, and I hear her before I finish the sentence. Which sea? What does your moon buy? Read me the line you deleted.
I delete the pretty part. I write the button.
Somewhere a goat she once outstared is still thinking about it, and somewhere my grandmother is sitting with her eyes closed, listening hard, waiting for me to tell her the truth.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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