"I Consider My Mother's Mind"

Remarks from the Fray:

What an absolute construct this poem presents, using the mixed internals of human consciousness about the self then attaching that to elements of the not self in a manner that lights itself along by shorting-out between the surreal and the absurd, yielding a sort of fixity with an equilibrium between absorption and return, the fulcrum of which is the poem itself.

The first five lines establish, using technical and mythical distances, a blunted cosmology between mother and daughter; the mother is resolved into an instinctual profile, caring but harsh, a further awayness for every presence made; the daughter is almost a by-product, saved only in that she has enough remove from the instinctual to allow her observations and thoughts to still freely transit the nearly sterile depths in her relationship with her mother -the poem's title seems nearly template in this regard, a thinking about another thinking, both physically fed, but lacking any blood-heat to the feeding, either of the selves or one to the other.

Another aspect that arises from the poem is that the 'mother' almost seems to be the urban environment, a city with its fixtures and motions, a 'mother' that absorbed so much of the wherewithal of the biological mother that they became a harsh, shared reality in the daughter's mind.

Here is a resignation that is relentless: oblivion absorbing, mammalian giving/abandoning perforce, with 'contracting' servicing both the giving and oblivion, a single nerve in time resonating anew from contact with opposites. These lines suggest that the relationship between mother and daughter amounted to little more than static electricity, the ghost of what real love could give and accomplish. This poem is like a cubist painting, coarse, done with grim hues. Cold. Unlovely. But a true family portrait for these times.

--Bratsche

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The separation between a mother and daughter as the child becomes woman is difficult under any circumstances. If there is a conflict in the relationship, the break can be a good thing, but is still painful – especially if the conflict is likely to remain unresolved. In reading today's poem, I see in it a young woman who has separated from her mother with serious and unresolved issues.

This is a woman who has grown up in the shadow of her mother. A mother who was, perhaps, overbearing – if you'll forgive a terrible pun on the opening line regarding Great and Small Bears.

I recalled that when my daughter entered college, she made deliberate use of every polysyllabic word she knew. It was her way of saying, "I'm a grownup – I've arrived – I'm as smart as you." Perhaps by using more sophisticated verbiage, the speaker is doing the same thing, showing that she has grown beyond that childhood suburb is out of Mama Bear's frigid and fearful cave.

And yet, in looking at the poem as a whole – a poem about a young woman who has escaped a bitter childhood – I believe it also emphasizes the intelligence of the speaker over her appearance. I believe that her appearance has been the issue that has divided mother and daughter, and, perhaps, irreparably damaged the relationship.

The poet uses the constellations of Ursa Major and Minor to indicate the relationship that will drive the poem – that of mother and daughter. She is flying above the city of her childhood, soaring above the remnants of the cave they shared, and she looks down upon those things that marked – and marred – her childhood.

I like the way she moves from the larger, less important things, to the smaller, specific, very important elements – from car factories to a picnic table, to the ruins of their winter garden not cleared away to the tell-all hairbrush. She speaks of decades – and I'm guessing that she's probably in her thirties, has escaped the "cave" some time ago, has no intention of stopping here to see Mom, but is thinking of her as she looks below.

--Angel

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Spaar's narrator seems to be interiorizing hours of listening to the sort of wandering, diffuse, grasping monologues an elderly parent might drift into when trying to respond to simple , direct questions; the process of trying to remember what is nearly gone from recall creates intriguing associations that are verbalized and followed on their own. Soon the answer to the question is not the point, and one is left to confront a narrative that is being told, spoken before it fades and is lost with the dying brain matter. One is witness to a personality trying to recreate one's life , to remember and perhaps feel something from the past yet again before the last moments of coherence are over, and the daughter, finally, accepts , grudgingly brutal facts of what happens with aging, and attempts to see the terrain of the decades her mother mentions in various pockets of lucidity.

The landscape is an intense blur , a montage; Spaar captures the feeling of Detroit I remember flying into my hometown where one can, if fortunate enough to have a window seat, witness the industrial city and it's suburbs, a grey, flat spread of factories, suburban sprawl, highways the width of mighty rivers, a hard land to raise a family in; I am impressed with Spaar's masterful contrasting of elements with simple put details, the facelessness of a city stooped shouldered and hardened through bitter weather and economic disaster, and a terse description of a family garden that attempts to thrive regardless of a downbeat outlook. The human element is many-layered here, struggling through the impersonal forces of inevitability and insisting that such a life matters; the mother who speaks of her life in defiance of the loss of re-collective powers, the daughter who attempts to imagine her mother's life as full and real based on the fractured and collage quality of the recall, and a family giving the home a human, "homey" touch that expresses the need for an abode to be welcoming , even in a city as violent and embittered as Detroit.

At this point I get the sense that Spaar's narrator has wandered the tableau she has mentally constructed from her mother's tersely phrased murmurings, has allowed herself to feel a rush of sensations the streets, the factories, seasons and winter gardens might arise, and to become overwhelmed, melancholic in what becomes a witnessing of another's life caught in the movement of small-scale history, formed from coincidences of context and personal choice. There is a feeling of helplessness, of wanting to give warning and consul and coming to the sober realization that there is nothing to do with the past except remember, draw from it what lessons one can, and try to use the experiences as useful touchstones for living in the present tense. But living in the present tense, in the now of the noun, does not severe one from the past and the sway it holds over us, no matter how much be busy ourselves with hobbies and acquiring more material things we don't need. Some almost forgotten thing will make the knees buckle, cause the eyes to blur with tears.

--Ted_Burke

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(7/13)

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