The Visitation
I woke up coughing the way my mother
used to cough. I sat up, held myself
until I stopped, still hearing it all around,
in the walls, banging around the dark gray
rooms, in the closet where I kept
the electric guitar my father tried to play
so long ago. My mother wasn’t there, wasn’t even
in the house; we’d taken her
to the hospital the night before,
left her there, watching us leave, her eyes,
her whole face, blurry through the oxygen tent.
I got up, still hearing the coughs. They were
my mother’s, part wailing, part moaning.
I walked the slick hall to the staircase,
held my breath and listened so hard
the house spun around. I started down
the steps, drawn down by my mother’s
violent, breathless wheezing. I moved
past the shadows of the banisters
and newel posts, their shadows and mine
moving up and down the steps as I
descended to the landing above the living room,
as the house fell silent. Next day, we went
to see her, and she seemed much better,
the blood having returned to her face.
The nurses had taken the tent away, and she
sat upright in her bed, having almost died,
she said, around 3 or 4, having risen up
from the bed, unable to get her breath,
and pushed the oxygen tent aside.
Nurses rushed in, grabbed her flailing arms
and held them, and the doctor came in
with the hypodermic of adrenaline
to get her breathing again, to bring
her back from our house of dust, from
the farewell she had gone home to bid.
Edisto Beach House Memories
Sitting with an aunt and uncle,
talking about family and those days
at the beach house, about people driving out there
from Aiken, Columbia and Sumter.
Rain falling outside the house, this morning
in Columbia, fog on the windows, delaying
our leaving, prolonging the drawl in their talk,
his hands trembling in his lap, and she
can’t walk up stairs anymore.
Who was the best mother, which child
was the most unsavory character? Who was it
kept inviting us into the shed, shutting the door,
climbing on the roof, and dropping duckshit
down on us? Which mother was it
let the children play when the hurricane
was coming. Where was she when the rain
started to fall on the water?
And there were
the outlaw family members, uncles who ran
guns and dope, a woman friend of one of them
who showed up at the beach house
late at night waving a pistol, demanding
everyone clear out. Probably looking
for a safe place to hole up for the night.
Quiet Columbia morning with reminiscences.
Fog on the windows of the big white
brick house, as we sat inside
listening to the long drawls, the laughter,
the eyes glancing at the windows, the morning
visit coming to an end, the fog burning off.
Living Alone
My mother lives alone.
Her clothes dryer and her stove
have broken, but she refuses
to let me buy her
new appliances.
She says someone could fix
the ones she already has,
if they’d just take the time.
“Who’s they?” I say,
and she pretends she doesn’t hear.
She cooks her food
on an old hotplate, hangs
her clothes on the line to dry
and says she’s fine, she
will make do.
Her neighbors have moved
and now the house next door
belongs to a computer repair company.
She complains that some nights
there are shapes in her yard
and in the yard next door.
She can hear music
and sometimes laughter,
sometimes feet moving through leaves
on the embankment behind the house,
hands pushing branches aside.
“Who do you think it is?” I say,
“Kids smoking dope?”
Thieves, she says, vandals.
There is trash
on the hillside back of her house:
part of a fence, rusted aluminum siding,
stuff nobody would bother to steal.
She tells me she spends hours every night
standing by the kitchen door
listening.
“Are you afraid?” I say.
“No,” she says, “I’m not afraid.”
“You’re sure?”
After we talk, I lie awake
wondering if she’s really afraid,
if something is out there
she should be afraid of.
She goes to the back door
and opens it, stares
into the dark that hides
the yard and the hillside.
I lie very still, my eyes
open, sweat on my face.
Her small house is full
of listening, hers and mine.
I keep thinking, Why
do you put up this fight? Fear
is nothing to be ashamed of.
After some minutes, she goes
to get a chair. It creaks
when she steps up on it.
Barely breathing, I watch her
unscrew the light bulb
in the kitchen, the last one
in the house.
She climbs down
blind and unafraid,
breaks the bulb against the stove
and drops the pieces
like eggshells in the trash.
The poems Randolph Thomas have appeared in Poetry, Quarterly West, Witness, Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Borderlands, Texas Review, Louisiana Literature, Greensboro Review and other journals. His book-length poetry manuscript has been a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Competition, and the Blue Lynx Prize, and his work has received state arts grants from the Arkansas Arts Council and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. He also writes fiction, and his short stories have appeared in The Hudson Review, Glimmer Train Stories, and Southwest Review. Randolph has an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of Arkansas and currently teaches English at Louisiana State University where he is assistant director of the creative writing program and faculty advisor to Delta Undergraduate Journal.
