Great

i called her Great

because my grannies were Grand

and she was the Greatest one I had.

given to a wealthy woman at nine years old,

she was provided with a new identity and a new life.

Great was re-named, sold, and re-souled

long before I was born.

at 22, she married a Minnesota Irishman

and they created my grandmother, Catherine,

who had the face of a 1940’s pin-up doll

and the 13 marriage proposals to prove it.

one day when i am grown,

i will receive a letter that Great wrote to her brother George.

it will reveal two things to me:

her political persuasion (liberal)

and her cure-all for common illnesses (baking soda).

“when i start to get sick i reach for the baking soda

to make my body more alkaline.”

but first, I was small

when Catherine took me on a train

to see Great in the Big Sky.

Great lived in a plain and rustic house

that straddled the horizon of a lush green pasture

and blue expanding sky, where swollen bright clouds

were fragrant with sweetgrass.

she let me roll her downy white hair in soft curlers,

her eyes still as bright and green

as mountain pines.

she wore her cotton and polyester dresses,

shapeless from washings and patterned by the past,

with the grace of an aristocratic intellectual—

an antiquarian Viking queen in peasant garments.

she taught me to pull water from the earth

with a red cast iron hand pump in the yard.

“it needs to be primed first,” she said,

placing her twisted and bony hands

over my small fleshy ones.

i discovered pockets

and filled them with stones and insects and flowers,

my black rubber boots sinking in the mud.

she set me on her knees

and sang me a Swedish lullaby,

"hoppe, hoppe, hare..."

(“jump, jump, rabbit…”)

i pretended to read books to Great

as she cradled me on the sofa,

but she stopped me—

and taught me the shape

of the words on the pages

instead.

she made figures

of my disfigures,

guiding my hands

as I drew faces and birds.

we picked dandelions and put them in salads.

we had soup and she let me drink coffee.

later, i washed the dishes while standing on a chair

and looking out the window.

“where are you from?” I asked her.

“i was born in Denver in 1893,” she said,

“but my father was from Austria.”

“you’re Australian?” I replied in awe.

when I was a high school Warrior,

Catherine and I visited her at the nursing home.

Great gripped my hands tightly

before playing the piano in the common room

and warbling the lyrics in the old songs from her youth.

one day, before Great flew away,

Catherine said to her, “Mom, let’s comb your hair,”

and she looked for a brush

but found only a drawer filled with medication

and random pairs of dentures.

i was in college when her song became silent.

now she sleeps tucked under the grass

on a small hill at the foot of the mountains.

now that I’m grown all the way

I can still find her in those moments

when i’m broken and sad,

her love warming the cold hollows

and deep sockets

in my heart.

i don’t know the escape velocity

of the light in her eyes,

but when i was small

it twinkled like the stars

in the sky.

now she’s a strand of the Universe,

a wave of the ocean,

tethered to my life even in death.