My Mother – The Demimonde

Lynn Greyling

My Mother – The Demimonde

He had heard him in that black night

fragrant as rotting oranges 

exotic as Africa –
his father's hissed

single-soul-shaking-word woke him
snaking through heavy air from their bed

to his cot against the wall in the hall

“Demimonde”

his father hissed harsh and low, black and red

as a Mardi Gras mask –
though other words

slithered - spawn hurried after –

“abomination,” “transgression,”

“allegiance,” these unlike Demimonde - all
 familiar echoes returning from boomed

Sundays back home when he sat

in scratchy silence on a hard pew

Awful but spoken - unlike “Demimonde”

He was seized in the stick and sweat of

that summer night with a wave of wistful

protective ifs, - if  he could just jump from that

summer shack and run through the New Orleans

night, find a church, light a candle, for God’s sake

Help her,

If he could only return, his mother of sweetness and light

back to the shelter of their laughing-tickling

drinking sweet tea on the way to the beach

hands swinging together singing – before his

father came from to visit - he was ready

to perform any multitude of eight-year-

old rites to bring her and him back out of this

dark demon studded night

Yet in the gray stickiness of almost dawn

he shrank, knowing she was beyond salvation

for he remembered “Demimonde”

and the Sears catalogue, seen just this past Tuesday

in Penny’s brother’s stash – that stash

of nearly naked women wearing “demi” somethings –

their wanton breasts, thrusting, spilling on the pages

under knowing smiles and now – in this night of reckoning

shamed by his staring, he was reborn

into irrevocable knowing

his own mother

was such a demi-wearing one –

and somewhere perhaps a boy such as he would

stare at his own “demimonde” mother and whisper

in childlike incarnation of his fathers condemnation

“I want her – I want those demimondes for myself.”

~




The Sunday Whirl