My favorite poems make me want to write, give permission to write about the hard things, and help me see the world anew. In this poem, Laux starts out in the third person, saying, “my mother” so it’s clear who she’s writing about. But the second stanza shifts into second person, a direct address to her mother, which helps us as readers feel the intimacy of the relationship. Guilt laces the first three stanzas, the guilt of being far away when her mother died, making the decision not to fly all the way across the continent to see her body, and not writing her mother’s obituary. Most of us can understand how guilt can be part of grief, as we think of what we did and didn’t do, what we might have done differently.
But the fourth stanza transforms grief and the moment Laux is writing about, the night she found out about her mother dying: “I stood with you,” it begins, and everything is changed. This act of imagination reclaims the relationship between daughter and mother, puts them together in the scene, both of them on “the ancient deck/of a great ship,” so they are on a journey together. And aren’t we all on a journey together with our loved ones, alive or dead? Then the final image of the stars “dead” but still “incandescent”—like the mother herself—and “singing as they went.” I love how this becomes not just an image of how the mother might have gone to whatever’s next—singing!—but how we might go when it’s our time. It’s still loss, it’s still death, and nothing in this poem suggests the writer’s firm belief in an afterlife. But now both writer and reader can associate the singing stars with loss—and grief is, even if in a small way, transformed.
Under Stars
When my mother died
I was as far away
as I could be, on an arm of land
floating in the Atlantic
where boys walk shirtless
down the avenue
holding hands, and gulls sleep
on the battered pilings,
their bright beaks hidden
beneath one white wing.
Maricopa, Arizona. Mea Culpa.
I did not fly to see your body
and instead stepped out
on a balcony in my slip
to watch the stars turn
on their grinding wheel.
Early August, the ocean,
a salt-tinged breeze.
Botanists use the word
serotinous to describe
late-blossoming, serotinal
for the season of late-summer.
I did not write your obituary
as my sister requested, could
not compose such final lines:
I closed the piano
to keep the music in. Instead
I stood with you
on what now seems
like the ancient deck
of a great ship, our nightgowns
flaring, the smell of dying lilacs
drifting up from someone’s
untended yard, and we
listened to the stars hiss
into the bent horizon, blossoms
the sea gathered tenderly, each
shattered and singular one
long dead, but even so, incandescent,
making a singed sound, singing
as they went.
Credit
Copyright © 2017 by Dorianne Laux. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 1, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem
“I was teaching a class in Provincetown when I got a phone call at 4 am. If we’re old enough, we know the news is never good at that time in the morning. After I hung up there was nothing but the thick quiet of the trees. What’s not in the poem is that I stepped out in my slip and picked up an old, three-legged chair that had been abandoned on the porch and threw it over the balcony where it shattered. That chair became the stars in the poem that I did look up to. It was the only thing I could do.”
—Dorianne Laux
Author
Dorianne Laux
The author of several collections of poetry, Dorianne Laux was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award for her book Facts About the Moon. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.