The Perpetual Melancholy of Pauline Larson
1898 – 1945
On the flat palm of prairie, you were born to wail
in the muffling dark of broken sod
and barn stones cobbled from the land
like potatoes peeled with a knife into a white
tin basin.
You were a blue girl inside a ring of desperate trees
circled with their backs to the northwest wind,
a daughter darning socks by a brother
whittling sticks while a blizzard
drift-locked your doors.
Pauline, how did you carry on in that county
of perpetual melancholy, wear wool washed
in muddy water pailed from Beaver Creek,
wear stains of silt that wouldn’t beat out
even as you stretched your skirts
over chokecherry?
Busted banks and world wars took and broke men
and sent them back to fields and streets of Hadley
with no wheat to feed them.
How did you lift despair in your hands and learn
to drink its tea so calmly? Marry a road
maker back from the trenches, bring
up babies in a caboose at the back
of his mule caravan?
How did you raise your only boy to let the ships
make him a man, dress him in sailor whites
washed in bleach to blur his fear sweat?
And more war? And then the war in your chest,
the knife in your breast.
How did you roast your last Easter meal, carry high
the platter of ham in your swollen arms
to your son come home in uniform?
How did you live that long?
Winnie B. and 100,000 Lobotomies
— For those, in the Mid-Twentieth Century,
subjected to surgery that severed the nerves
connecting the front part of the brain
to the thalamus.
I am bringing back your frontal lobe,
I am bringing back the skull they broke in two–
you climbing the bars in the third floor white room,
you with your toes in the bars, your teeth
screw driving the screws to chew off the grate,
you with your shaved head, you in your sized too small
straight jacket in the third floor white room
(They said you were waiting).
I am bringing back your frontal lobe,
I am bringing back the skull. They used a drill.
Dr. Oh diagnosed a mote in your eye, blinding, you see,
blinding you so you couldn’t look after your daughter,
couldn’t cook sausage in a pan for the father of your daughter
on the stove he bought in the kitchen in the house in the town
he loved more than you running down the street screaming, more
than you running your Norwegian tongue naked down the street.
I am bringing back your frontal lobe, I am bringing back
the skull they drilled into, and the motes that fell on the floor
and fled down the fire escape when Dr. Oh, he didn’t look
for them, put down his drill or ice pick, didn’t take off
his dripping red gloves, his wet lab coat, I come for the bits
of you they took from you, I come to hold the name of you,
Winefred, take it with me from the floor of the institution.
It was wrong to claim you were waiting.
________________________________________________________________
Paula C. Lowe lives on a cattle ranch three hours north of LA. Her poems appear in Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, Tule Review,Askew, The Iowa Review, Dogwood, Sow’s Ear and more. Her latest book, Moo, releases in early 2014, and her poems appear in the anthologies Bird as Black as the Sun and Poems For Endangered Places. Formerly managing editor for Solo Press, Lowe is a co-publisher at Big Yes Press.
