Bessie and Me

When I asked the only matriarch 

I have ever known, What was my grandmother

like? I heard, She never longed for anything 

she did not have. My only photograph of Bessie

shows her standing seaside with family,

all in bathing suits, sturdy New England 

Irish immigrants with dark hair and proud eyes. 

Mirroring my own mother's eyes. My mother, 

always young, and not the matriarchal type, 

told me my father never got over 

the loss of his mother when he was fourteen. 

About the age I felt mine drift away 

from me. And I have drifted, too. 

The grandmother I never knew appears 

an angel I rarely talk to, although 

I do speak to those departed who loved 

impeccably. Loved me. Made me feel 

understood. Even my young aunt always said 

of me She's a little individual 

unlike others. In another photograph 

in the house is one of me at age five or six. 

Wearing a soft flannel shirt and jeans too big 

for me. I am standing near the barn 

on my mother's parents' land. A small gray-

yellow cat appears at the bottom 

of the picture in the green field. You can see 

my father's eyes, my mother's softness, 

my own intensity. Focus. Intention. 

Now I keep waking to another morsel 

of understanding. My work maybe 

resembling Bessie's work of placing people 

coming over from Ireland in jobs. 

An informal connector in her time. 

Bringing up six children, three her own, 

and three the children of her deceased sister. 

If only Bessie would whisper to me 

from that distant place apart from where I live. 

Live simply as she within that theater 

denoting other people's views, imputing 

their own ideas from the costumes and roles 

connoting the sense of indelible 

responsibility beneath mild gazes

with a softer pride and quiet confidence.