My grandmother
(her name was not Sue but we called her that)
was passionate when she was a young woman,
and impulsive, I can tell. One of those women
with a selfish smile and plump face,
twirling hands and sexy as hell in
a kimono or pedal pushers and little orange shoes.

She left her first husband in Japan, baby or no,
left a daughter to
Grandma Perfume
and married a soldier, American. Pragmatic, white;
Scandinavian descent.

With handfuls of scratchy sweaters she was perhaps adept at splitting people apart,
leaving my mother to sew em, maybe, later,
the best she knew how, raised on rules and breakfast fish,
deep bows of proper restraint—no fathers—and years!
Leaving my mother and eventual trip to
Indiana, my mother:
A high school girl from the coast with
long black hair and an opportunity to learn some English. The baby
now wary, never having been overly emotional.
They must have driven one another crazy,
Impulse and her daughter
watching over the tops of her glasses and never deigning to pick the fights.

My mother
got a Ph.D. and married a sensible man.
My mother used to be a waitress
at the Lotus Garden in Scottsdale, Arizona. (She tells me
that there, she never had to carry trays and trays piled high like the women do
at Denny’s, that all the girls wheeled the Chinese platters around on svelte little carts.
I worry about her spiraling intellect,
wasted on carts of food
on a sensible man.)

I don’t know a thing about Sue, whether she spiraled up
or at all; she never told me a thing.
She wore illness badly, liked to be up and about. Bridge on weekends.
Junk food, crackers, that cheese in cans.
Her eye liner grew thick and wobbly with her hands. Diabetes, the Buick,
satellite TV, the easy chair, the whole nine. Rare, painstaking visits with her daughter,
her sensible son-in-law.
Made jokes when her soldier died, having had, I expect, enough
of his pain, features, the tumors, the age, growing through.
But then it was love that pulled her in after,
before she knew it herself. What else could it have been? Love:

Christmas was lonely
so she toasted him high,
again and again until she was dead.

05.01.01