Poetry by Beverly Hennessy Summa

             ​keka marzagao CC



​
Last Harvest
After Maurice Sendak’s interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air

                “And I look right now, as we speak together,
                out my window in my studio, and I see my trees
                and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds
                of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see, I can see
                how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old.”
                                                                         —Maurice Sendak

She reaches for the dial,
turns the volume up, just enough,
to escape from the restless stirrings
of her two children who fussed 
from the backseat after a long day at daycare.

The speaker’s words crackle in a dirge 
of ragged sobs and tremulous laughter.
The thin voice breaks and splits like old wood,
& she recognizes his name as the author
of several books she’s read to her children
on the nights when she had the strength
to hold a book between her overworked hands.  

It was usually after bath time & before 
she retired to the back porch with a beer
& sometimes a cigarette that she would 
predictably beat herself up for the next day. 

She steers the old Camry through a pocket 
of slow traffic, while he speaks
in his gentle manner about love and grief-
tenderly unfolding 83 years of memory 
& artistic vision, like thumbing through
an old photo album.

It’s just after dinnertime, and her thoughts are
already scrabbling over refrigerator leftovers 
& the pell-mell collection of bills 
that have papered the kitchen counter since last week.

Her eyes dip drowsily, nerves closely drawn,
but the lush acres of his words gather within her
 like a late summer harvest.

Live your life, live your life, live your life,
he softly chants.  

From the review mirror she glances at her children. 
Their small, obstreperous bodies securely
belted into the curve of the backseat.
Their faces smooth and glowing in the lilac light. 

She takes a deep breath, holds it within her lungs,
scowls as she searches for memories of her own mother-
if she had read to her, read his books to her. 
There weren’t many books or keepsakes to keep back then. 
They’d traveled light and moved often.  

Live your life, live your life, live your life.

The headlights are swallowed 
into the fading nebula of twilight,
and she squints to see a bent, ghostly figure 
thrusting a white cane at the encroaching darkness. 
The cane pendulates in tight, searching arcs, 
raking and stabbing the sidewalk-
hunting for hidden dangers.

She is reminded of her grandmother, 
who she once believed 
was an angel in a kitchen apron.
She died alone in her floral nightgown 
on the nursing home floor. 
The aquiline nose, that never looked down
on anyone, was broken.

Live your life, live your life, live your life,
he softly chants
                like the fading outro of a song-
the heart’s wild longings still being born, 
even as the body swings towards its final hours. 

She turns the sedan onto the street 
she and her children call home
and feels the locked paddock within her chest 
punch open.  & the tears she held in for so long,
slip down her rouged cheeks now. 

Like mayflies in spring, she swats them away,
but still they come with the author’s 
prophetic message suspended across
a shifting horizon of telephone lines
& billboard signs.  

She cries for him, and she cries with him
until the car is parked in the familiar driveway.
She turns to see her children, peaceful, fatherless,
asleep in their car seats, then looks through 
the dusty windshield into the deepening ink
of the numinous night.  

Her eyes fall on the craggy and mysterious trunk 
of a giant, old oak, & she can’t tell 
if it’s an oak or a maple or some other species,
but the trees, she wonders— 

when did she last look at the trees?




Beverly Hennessy Summa’s poems have appeared in Rust + Moth, Chiron Review, the New York Quarterly, Buddhist Poetry Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, Nerve Cowboy, Hobo Camp Review and others.  She has a BA in English and is a Pushcart nominee.  Beverly grew up in Yonkers, New York and New Hampshire and currently lives in South Salem, New York with her family.