Her Grapes by Carolyn Dahl (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Her Grapes
by Carolyn Dahl

The grapes don’t know
            they are the only song still singing.
            Summer flowers fell silent, numbed by frost.
            The bats, dark twins of birds,
            have tucked their sopranos into fur,
            strung the vacant house with curls of toes,
            folded their skin wings against winter.

So much lost.
            Breath, made only of air,
            cannot support the heavy words I
            need to say. The grapes carry the weight,
            clustered burdens clinging to rotting fences,
            brown tendrils waving through early snow
            like antennae listening for her slow coming.

I pick a fat grape,
            roll it in my mouth,
            last taste of family vines.
            I swallow the sweet flesh,
            but the skin sticks to my tongue.
            What to do with this bitterness?
            Spit it to the ground, or chew
            the shell of useless abundance?

Grief is the shadow I drag
            through the red light of my body.
            My mother’s days became too fragile
            to repeat. How many years could she
            pour summer into glass jars? In the cellar,
            I find last year’s jelly, take it home
            to spread the quivering purple
            on bread. Feed the sorrow, my mother
            would have said, just as the grapes
            will feed next year’s bird song, just as
            the bats will stretch in the attic, fly
            directionless into another spring.

First published in the author’s collection, A Muddy Kind of Love (North Dakota State University Press). 

Artwork by Silenkovaela. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Grief is a surprise visitor. You never know which objects will trigger its appearance. I thought I had removed all sorrow-provoking possessions from the family home, but I forgot about the grapes my mother had planted herself. As I stood by the heavy vines, I realized that they too were experiencing a loss:  she would never come to pick their summer abundance, and I would never have another jar of jelly once the last two were gone. “Is there a more heavenly color than purple grape jelly,” her voice used to say, and with that ringing in my mind, I began my poem.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Mother and daughter in a carnival photo booth, Minnesota, date unknown.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carolyn Dahl won the 2020 North Dakota State University Chapbook contest for A Muddy Kind of Love, the first place award for Art Preserves What Can’t Be Saved  in the National Federation of Press Women’s Communication competition, and the grand prize in ARTlines2 ekphrastic poetry contest.  She lives in Houston, Texas, and when she isn’t writing poems, creates art (she has appeared on HGTV and PBS) and enjoys raising monarch butterflies in her kitchen. Visit her at  carolyndahlstudio.com.