Mother's Friend

We stopped by and she greeted us so happily,
delighted by our voyage, by our departure
to faraway realms, that kind of happy person
who sees at once the happiness potential
in simply getting out of bed. She laughed
with such American delight, fifties delight,
an aura of red lipstick and home permanent,
like any mother's visage of that time,
flushed with its screen of sunny optimism.
She welcomed us into her living room,
as if it were our last real reminder
of home, before we left our land of plenty
and sailed to the adventurous, poor, old world.
For weren't the fifties the true "American century,"
that respite, when our mothers, like this one,
recognized our destiny was manifest?
Everyone must be happy for us, as she was,
the world must have been happy for America
as America was happy for itself.
To be happy for others takes a kind of talent,
without concern that you are happy, too.
Certain adults impart it unto children —
teachers have the gift and grandparents
who marvel at their secondhand creations.
It is the gift of all those true adults
who made you feel a smarter, better person,
just being in their company, keeping up.

And yet when we returned a decade later,
still full of our adventure and ourselves,
we found the sadness of the sixties had descended —
no smile, no makeup — crowding her small house,
which had seemed large so many years before.
We sat with knees touching on dark sofas
and listened as she recalled our time away
as the time of her mother's dying, these huge chairs
her souvenirs. Our mother brought a spoon from Edinburgh
and didn't have the heart to give it to her.
No, the sixties would be happier than that —
even with all the catastrophic killing —
for most of us the sixties would be happier.
And then for some they'd be like any time.

Mark Jarman
The Southern Review
Volume 42, Number 2
Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Louisiana State University.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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