Exculpatory Lilies by Susan Musgrave

Author:Susan Musgrave [Musgrave, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

MY MOTHER VISITS HER BELOVED IN IRELAND

I’ve never known the word airport to look so

lonely, all seven letters, each one an orphan,

as we head out of Dunsany for the road

to Dunshaughlin—you turn left, his wife said,

then you scatter. My mother has loved this man

for thirty years, though he will never know.

I can’t find the road and neither of us can stop

weeping, me for my mother and she because

she believes she’ll never see him again. I take

her old hand and she turns her head away, as if

feelings are something a person her age shouldn’t

show. Have you seen any signs, she asks, as I turn

onto the M4 by accident, a soulless

motorway I exit from after paying a mighty toll.

Earlier, while she sat in the parlour talking politics

with the man she has loved since even before

my father died, I went outside and collected

horse chestnuts from his drive: how else to pass

the time? Every fall my father hid horse chestnuts

in our house—he believed they would banish

the spiders my mother was deathly afraid of.

(I thought he was mad, but now I do the same.)

My mother told me, before we flew to Ireland,

she wants to be buried with the pebble she “stole”

from her love’s driveway twenty-five years ago—

it’s all she asks. I wish I could find her a lovelier stone

but the crushed gravel under my feet today feels

too ordinary in a lifeless sort of way. My tears subside

somewhere around Swords, when Mum starts to fret

she has failed to fill in her Taxback forms

properly: each one is different, they go out of their way

to make it hard. I wonder at how quickly the mind,

like the road, is diverted, and why I never take warnings

such as ROAD CLOSED LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY

literally. Your father was the same way, my mother says

when I have to turn around and take the detour

I should have taken in the first place, then stop

for petrol because, as Mum has reminded me

for the two weeks we’ve been on holiday,

“we’re supposed to bring the car back full.”

I still haven’t seen any signs, she says, and then,

when I suggest we check the map, I don’t want

to go home. The world isn’t big enough for this

much sorrow: is there anywhere, I wonder,

we can call home? I tell her we will turn around

go back the way we came, buy a house in the village,

she’ll see him every day. I don’t care where we go,

she says, but I know she won’t feel this way forever.

In the next town we come to I see it finally posted:

Airport 4, and the wind blows through the vowels

of the word I wish had never been born. Planes climb

into the wind-tossed clouds, the sound they make

filling me with the vast sky’s emptiness. And suddenly

we’ve arrived. The signs point to TERMINAL 1,

CARGO, MORTUARY, WAY OUT. Jesus, I think.

The Irish. The words airport and mortuary

have more than five letters in common; who needs

the mortal reminder at this time? I find the hotel, check in,

help Mum upstairs, then cut myself trying to open

the screw-top bottle of Chilean wine while she fights

with the locked window to let in the fresh airport air.

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