a thousand furnished rooms

American Life in Poetry: Column 60

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Most of us have taken at least a moment or two to reflect upon what we have learned from our mothers. Through a catalog of meaningful actions that range from spiritual to domestic, Pennsylvanian Julia Kasdorf evokes the imprint of her mother's life on her own. As the poem closes, the speaker invites us to learn these actions of compassion.

What I Learned From My Mother

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewing even if I didn't know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

Reprinted from "Sleeping Preacher," University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, by permission of the publisher. First printed in "West Branch," Vol. 30, 1992. Copyright (c) 1992 by Julia Kasdorf. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

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