Mother Water Ash, page 1
MOTHER
WATER
ASH
MOTHER
WATER
ASH
poems
NICOLE COOLEY
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BATON ROUGE
Published by Louisiana State University Press
lsupress.org
Copyright © 2024 by Nicole Cooley
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any format or by any means without written permission of Louisiana State University Press.
LSU Press Paperback Original
Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom
Typefaces: Whitman, text; Chong Modern, display
Cover illustration: Breathing, 2021, by Sibylle Peretti
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cooley, Nicole, author.
Title: Mother water ash : poems / Nicole Cooley.
Other titles: Mother water ash (Compilation)
Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024009652 (print) | LCCN 2024009653 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-8071-8246-8 (paperback) | ISBN 978-0-8071-8263-5 (epub) | ISBN 978-0-8071-8264-2 (pdf)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3553.O5647 M68 2024 (print) | LCC PS3553.O5647 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23/eng/20240301
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009652
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009653
in memory of my mother Jacqueline
and for my sister Alissa
Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing . . .
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, “The Mark on the Wall”
CONTENTS
On the Mississippi River Levee, Styrofoam Cup in My Hand
~~~~~
Sixteen Years to the Day Another Hurricane Reverses
Missing
[With each Mississippi River flood, water spills out of the river]
My Mother’s Ashtray
Monochords
Still Life, South Galvez Street, 1978
[Twenty miles from the Gulf of Mexico’s coast]
Mother Water Ash
Breathwork
Missing
[Another summer of the vanishing. Summer]
Still Life, Jefferson Highway
My Mother’s Nightgowns Smell Like Smoke
Missing
[Once the coastline spoke: I plan to disappear and tell you nothing]
Monochords
Being the Oldest Daughter
Mourning, Silk and Lace
[Could the California fires ever fill the Mississippi]
Missing
Still Life, River Road
Missing
On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen
[Ten years into the After, the Mississippi]
After My Mother Dies I Crave the Seventies
My Mother’s Matches
Elegy, Napoleon House, New Orleans
Monochords
New Orleans Love Poem
Downriver
Acknowledgments
Notes
MOTHER
WATER
ASH
On the Mississippi River Levee, Styrofoam Cup in My Hand
that will disintegrate in 500 years I drink my coffee stand in gravel
in my church skirt black velvet I wore to my mother’s funeral
eleven days ago take a photo
of my own shadow on the railroad tracks to Snapchat
to my daughters while this river outside
my parents’ house is rising higher than in years
spillways opened live oaks sunk in mud grass
littered with plastic bags and beer cans Levee Trash: A Photo Essay
my former self might think that self so well-versed in irony
that careful daughter who would take notes
then shut her notebook now on the levee
a white truck speeds by too fast
maybe a man who picks up shifts on rigs for extra money
and in a former life I’d write a poem
about how that man might be dangerous
to my daughters now I write
nothing
I am here to walk off my restless
sadness to walk off my mother’s voice
years ago after the storm when the city flooded telling me she will never
leave New Orleans no matter
how high water rises or how many times levees breach telling me
she will die in her house
no evacuations no hospitals
Now I know grief has its own topography mine is
this city and this coast
~~~~~
Sixteen Years to the Day Another Hurricane Reverses
the Mississippi’s course my father waits in our house
beside the river and I dream my mother drowning
water closing over her head in my dreams she is always
dying in the too-warm Gulf then pricked alive again
fairy-tale spindle my friends and I text each other
to describe dreams in which our mothers
ask us why they’re dead New Orleans is the place
around which I uselessly orbit after Katrina typing
my mother’s name Missing Person Jacki Cooley
into search engines sixteen years ago my daughters asked
what is a hurricane’s eye what can it see
then my mother was alive refusing to leave the city
now I text my father how high is the water are there tornadoes
phone and electric out I wish for a slick of river
to spare our house while in a new dream about my mother
she thrashes to the Gulf’s sand floor where she can’t
burn or come apart
Missing
At the coffee shop before I pick up
my daughters from school
my mother three weeks dead
my tea tastes like smoke
and I list all the seasons
she is now missing
summer hot as the inside of a mouth
winter when my hair freezes
on my walk to the train
fall afternoon air rinsed cold
trees ringed with dead leaves
and I wear her coat
Grief is a river or it’s an animal
sharp-toothed and urgent
When my first daughter was a baby
my mother said—of all I strived to do
that my girl would not remember—
She would know the absence of it—
My mother held my babies on her lap
my mother taught me how
to be a mother
Grief is a metronome clicking on my mother’s piano
while she watched
me practice badly
Grief is the fact that my hands belong to her
like hers my veins run too
close to the skin
Grief is the fact that her hair
which never greyed
resembles mine
The absence of it
~~~~~
With each Mississippi River flood, water spills out of the river.
Spill: a word too lovely.
Spill of grief, I write, cross out.
I’m taking too many notes.
A floodlight’s fake illumination reveals nothing—
I want something tiny and unfindable—
my mother’s ring, her thimble.
My desk is flooded with papers.
Flood chat: to send a huge amount of data to another user.
Considered especially rude if the text is uninteresting.
The television floods our dark bedroom with too many images.
Another storm. Another rising river. Fire.
Is this why my younger daughter cries or is she crying
for my mother?
Flood of tears. I only cry for my mother when
my daughters are at school,
when I sit at my desk to write everything down—
without my mother, without my girls who don’t yet know
how much they miss—
My Mother’s Ashtray
with the last of her DNA gold clamshell I snap shut
now shoved under my couch to avoid also to save
while I want my mother to return to offer me a list
of how I failed to snip a strand of her hair
at the funeral home for safe keeping how
I never wore the skirts she sewed after my first love left
how when she visited to help with my babies I refused
to let her smoke in the house demanded she sit on the cold
porch with the ashtray without her now I am back at the dark corner
of myself the old urge to step out of my body drop it
on the floor like a crumpled dress skip a meal run harder
as I lie on the floor of my daughter’s room fevered and finally
asleep too old for this in the middle of the night I will
my mother to come back to slip the ashtray out
from underneath the couch ashtray I won’t empty
should I save the butts her lips once touched their own
museum exhibit she won’t return which means I fail
my mother we called the skirts the guilt skirt
they still drape folded stiff on a hanger beside my girls’ dresses
and her nightgowns my father gave me I know she kept
the ashtray secret from my daughters under the couch
ashed and ready just as I collect my teenage daughters’ baby clothes
in a box ruffled toddler dress blue sleep sack just as
I wear her black raincoat now as if my body could ever
be equivalent to hers I flip the ashtray open like a beer can
or a jewelry box a bed warmer to be held against a hearth fire
I research ashtrays on eBay to avoid myself to not finish this poem
in which my mother is finally dead and I have the evidence
in my house this stick handle like a wrist
Monochords
1.
Grief: necklace burdening the throat, heft of a baby, bare legs gripping my hips.
2.
My mother held my babies best, nuzzled chin to chest, taught me how to give a first bath to my first daughter in a plastic tub on the kitchen table.
3.
Grief: a crape myrtle tree branch snags against my wrist, and I am ten and I swallow a chip of my mother’s black soap, a present from my father, from her nightgown drawer.
4.
Once breath pressed out of her body.
5.
I hate all the people who still have mothers.
6.
My mother slipped peaches into the mouth of my first girl in her highchair; taught my second daughter to read.
7.
She taught me breath against skin, proof a child is breathing, and I watch the rise and fall of my daughter against my mother’s chest.
8.
Repeated dream after my mother dies where I find dragonflies the size of palms and wonder if they came from my body or hers—
9.
Care: a burdened state of mind, as that arising from heavy responsibilities; worry.
10.
How my mother took care. How my mother took care of my daughters. How my mother—
11.
How we did not know she was dying.
12.
Care: charge, custody, keeping, supervision; trust in watching, guarding, overseeing.
13.
How I never sat by her bed all night while she slept nor wondered whether I would be able—
14.
Objects that will now forever make me sad:
15.
Care: mental suffering; grief. An object or source of worry, attention, or solicitude.
16.
Objects: Salem 100s. Velvet dollhouse curtains. Mixing bowl. Her handwriting.
17.
She who took care—
18.
No fentanyl patch, fly-paper sticky, no pills to grind under my heel as I slam out the door.
19.
No taking care, hand on a back, over a shoulder, no surgical glove,
shiver of silver and green—
Still Life, South Galvez Street, 1978
“Stay upstairs,” my mother tells me. “Take care of your sister.” Inside our house, floodwaters are rising
Inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot, our basement brims with water. Rain lashes the windows. Parish drainage pumps have failed. My sister and I stand at the top of the basement stairs, watching my dollhouse, the house my mother built from scratch, painted, and decorated, the house for which she sewed four dolls, each the size of a finger, replicas of each member of our family.
Everything in the basement is ruined, and I am a selfish, bad daughter who cares only about her dollhouse.
For three days, we don’t go to school. We don’t leave the house. We sit at the top of the basement stairs. Floodwater does not drain. Water rises to my dollhouse’s edge, swirls over the cobblestone path that circles the house. I wish for the interior of the house, all six rooms, painted a shiny, enameled pink, to stay dry and safe. Portraits she made from postcards and hung on the walls. Rugs she crocheted. Canopy bed she built.
In the basement, the water is now a foot deep. “The water is full of chemicals and run-off from the street,” my mother says. “Stay right there.” Toxic or not, the water rises, and she wades through it, barefoot.
The levees do not break, no floodwalls crack. Yet nothing in the basement can be saved. Except my dollhouse.
Proof of my mother’s magic: she built me my own house that can’t ever be destroyed.
~~~~~
Twenty miles from the Gulf of Mexico’s coast,
I wrote in my notebook, at the edge of St. Mary Parish.
Low coastal marshes, ridges of alluvial land.
And we are losing it.
Rigs stretched over the Gulf like flightless birds
over sand and billboards, all steadily erasing.
Seventy miles west of New Orleans is Morgan City,
the gateway to the Gulf!
It was high school and the lesson was about the Nearly Gone
but we were sixteen and bored.
Film voice-over too loud and bright, rows of desks
too close, classroom too dark—
In 1947, the first offshore oil well was drilled, very far
from any land or citizens, perfectly safe, beginning a new era
for the state, a black gold rush.
I copied facts and watched the rain out the science classroom window,
sewers and gutters filling, brimming, afternoon storm water
as usual with nowhere to go.
Mother Water Ash
Mother gone to ash river gone to drowned
I don’t live here anymore as my friends remind
Now I walk the edge of the Grand Central Parkway
Flushing Meadows Park world’s fair gone dark
what is ashed and drowned what is abandoned
Mother gone drowned in her body the night
she died alone in New Orleans ashed her cigarette
then left us did I go dark when the N train lost power
on my way home while the burning threaded through
my baby’s hair city doused in ash impossible
to keep the outside out River Road beside my parents’ house
leads to Cancer Alley Mother gone but once with her
I drove through the drowned city two months after
the storm yellowed grass houses gone the road
a slur of empty is it any wonder I’ve followed her advice
to subtract myself good daughter always till I’m not
did I go dark when she left me when will my daughters
while my mother’s mouth is all slick black feathers
Breathwork
Now I say mom and I float to the ceiling.
~~~~~
Breath: meaning “ability to breathe,” hence “life,” is from ca. 1300. Meaning “a single act of breathing,” from the late fifteenth century; sense of “the duration of a breath, a moment, a short time,” from the early thirteenth century. Meaning “a breeze, a movement of free air.”
~~~~~
Five months ago in New Orleans my mother stopped breathing.
Now at yoga class in the final posture, Savasana, pose I struggle with most because I must sink into stillness, and I know it’s wrong but I imagine a lit cigarette between my fingers.
My mother taught me well and carefully, and with gifts. In high school, she bought me cigarettes so I would not eat.
~~~~~
Breath: from an Old English word for “odor, scent, stink, exhalation, vapor.” Old English for “air exhaled from the lungs.”
~~~~~
Now I mourn my mother through breath.
~~~~~
Each morning, I stretch out on a mat in a hot room and squeeze my eyes shut and breathe her in. Or breathe her out. Yes, breath should anchor me, but I use it to exit my body, just as my mother taught me. I rise to the ceiling of the yoga room, alone and untethered.
I wish to lie on the levee in the dirt and gravel.
Instead I lie on the mat miles away from the house where she died.
~~~~~
Drown smoke suffocate What is the difference?
~~~~~
I close my eyes and in my dream my mother drowns in the river two blocks from her house.
In another dream I shake her awake. I ask her, with frustration, if she will go on being dead.
~~~~~
I only practice hot yoga, want infrared heat that spills from vents and warms the floor. I love the punishing. And the intense heat echoes a New Orleans levee walk, all stifling humidity. I lower my body into plank, crush my breasts to the ground. Think of my mother’s body.
