No one can be buried here
who doesn’t live here, my sister says.
She lives year-round in this town
where our ancestors settled many great-greats ago.
I’ve taken one of the thin china cups
we all sipped our coffee from each morning
at the drop-leaf maple table
on the wide-planked pine kitchen floor.
On the cup, lovers whose families
don’t want them to be together.
They turn into birds who pause in the air
above their home.
I carry the landscape, generations
of hopes and desires,
in this thin china cup that has lasted
several centuries
a cup not bequeathed to me,
but that I gingerly took, perhaps with permission.
Yes, with permission, back when they didn’t know
what they were giving, and I didn’t yet know what I was taking.
I, who took so much and thought I had little to give.
Which memories do I summon when I write:
my great-grandmother planting potatoes,
my grand-mother drying tarragon in bunches from the rafters,
my sister and me sitting on a bench shelling peas in the late afternoon.
We had different colored checkered napkins
to mark our places for the week
while we visited on vacations.
Our mother assured us
this place, this house, this town
was home.
Back in the kitchen of my apartment
in Manhattan, I mix my very own brew
in the morning light when I am alone:
beets and cherries topped with a nightshade,
the rhubarb our grandmother loved.
My words come.
The cup holds it all.
Pamela Butler is a neuroscientist. Her research examines the fragmented ways people with severe mental illness sometimes perceive the world and how this plays out in social situations. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The World Women in Neuroscience Newsletter, The Closed Eye Open, and Beyond Words Magazine.
