My Mother – The Demimonde
He had heard him in that black night
fragrant as rotting oranges
exotic as Africa –
his father's hissed
his father's hissed
single-soul-shaking-word woke him
snaking through heavy air from their bed
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
though other words
slithered - spawn hurried after –
“abomination,” “transgression,”
“allegiance,” these unlike Demimonde - all
familiar echoes returning from boomed
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.”
