Michael Diehl, Coloring the Wind
All the clear surfaces
Clutter gone from the kitchen table —
butter dish jar of peanuts jar of jam jar of cinnamon-sugar
salt and pepper emptied
from small cardboard cylinders (they must
have come with Meals on Wheels) into bubbled-glass
with dented metal tops familiar from childhood
top of the fridge scrubbed, cupboard drawers purged of
paper straws, Kris Kringle church friend presents (tiny
green felt tree, red-sequinned)
The kitchen can breathe now, we say —
cactus by the sink window
stained-glass bear suspended from a mullion
all the clear surfaces: table, counter, floor, cupboard top.
“I wish we could have made it this way for Mom,” Liz says,
“but she wouldn’t let us. She just wouldn’t.”
Straightening her kitchen. Except, shaped
by our need, it’s no longer quite
Mom’s kitchen, not quite itself, its story —
what had been unbound pages, loose-edged —
edited, extraneous details deleted:
saved wrapping paper, string,
safety-pin stork with red toothpick beak
_____________
Sue Chenette
Review by Zeke Sanchez
Poem appears to be about our penchant to try to halt the progress of entropy. We want our own personal universe to maintain order, to be as we want things to be. The protagonist appears to be a daughter speaking to her sister, Liz, about cleaning out the knickknacks accumulated in their mother’s kitchen. The mother, deceased now, went about being a human being, creating a mildly disorderly kitchen that suited her. The daughters clean even the top of the fridge, get rid of the butter dish, jar of peanuts, etc. They want clean lines. Reminds me of a Hemingway short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In that story a lonely old man seeks a café with a lot of good light and clean table cloths where he can drink quietly, unbothered by noisy, obstreperous drunks. In Sue Chenette’s poem, the daughters feel good in having cleaned the kitchen so it can “breathe now.” They feel good in having done good work, but recognize that in doing that they’ve changed the character of the kitchen, so that it “is no longer quite Mom’s kitchen.”
Review by Sue Fagalde Lick
The subject matter is familiar. All of us who reach a certain age have cleaned out a loved one’s house, facing the mess and the illogical keepsakes and opening the doors that were previously closed to us. Here, the poet claims our attention with familiar details: the butter dish, the small cardboard cylinders from Meals on Wheels, the paper straws in the drawers. We feel the frustration of wishing they could have made it neat and clean for the mother, but she didn’t want that. I love the way the elements in the second line—butter dish jar of peanut jar of jam—mash into each other without punctuation because that’s how it feels, so much, too much. Indeed, the first stanza is as chaotic as the kitchen while the lines fall into more standard syntax as the poem goes on. The image of unbound pages edited is wonderful, but then we’re left with the safety-pin stork in a sentence that has no clear ending—like life. Wonderful.