All the Difference poems of unconventional motherhood Published by Blade of Grass Press 2012 Paperback, 56 pages Also available in Kindle version Click here to order. |
"In tightly written, evocative poems, Shirley Glubka confronts the most decisive choice of her life: to give her three-year old son to another woman to raise. Written over four decades, these poems wrestle with all aspects of that decision, tracing the relationship she has maintained with her son and her own evolving psyche as she makes a life without him. With scalding honesty and language that is often pared to the bone, Glubka questions our basic assumptions about relationship, art, our lust for experience, and existence itself. These poems are a gift to non-custodial mothers but also to all of us as we live out the decisions we have made but can never second-guess." —Sonia Gernes, poet, novelist, educator, author of What You Hear in the Dark and The Way to Saint Ives
"This volume with its layered and progressive reflections over a lifetime is fascinating and illuminating...about as thorough and thoughtful as any reflection on mothering I've read, and certainly unique. Whatever anxieties Shirley Glubka and her son Kevin have suffered as a result of her decision, he is very lucky to have a mother who still cares for him, who is both a poet and a philosopher." —Margaret Blanchard, poet, novelist, artist, educator, author of This Land: a Novel Memoir and Water Spies |
Excerpt from the author's Preface:
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Koan (Zen Buddhism): "A riddle without a solution
used to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning
and provoke sudden enlightenment."
(The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)
used to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning
and provoke sudden enlightenment."
(The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)
The experience of being a mother—or becoming a mother, for it is a never-finished, ever-shifting condition—has been my koan. I'm not a Buddhist, and the thought of "sudden enlightenment" unsettles me, but the word--koan--has been for decades one of my words. It fits so well in the hand somehow.
When my son Kevin was three years old his day care teacher came to me. He was very angry, this beautiful boy—a biter, a bit of a problem, though a charismatic one. How she loved him! She herself could not achieve a pregnancy, a sorrow in her life. We talked and talked. He went to live with her, his new mother. I became a shadow mother, a visitor, a sometime babysitter. I felt unsuited for the long work of daily parenting, though exactly what "unsuited" meant was, and still is, more mystery than explanation. |
Sample poems from All the Difference:
Brown Paper A thin wind, sound gone before it is heard. The soul stuffed carelessly between books, the books read long since, the age Victorian. The body bewildered, the child of it absent, the fresh breath kept, wrapped in brown paper. Coming of Age —for Kevin I have been thinking of strings and how you will soon turn 21. I have been thinking of packages and how they come undone. Inside the surprise-- more string and strong after all. You were an odd package, pushed out like a pup and tied to me, full of firm flesh, yelling well. I had no worry about deficit of being. You were enough. I could feel that with my fingers. Perhaps you should know: such an imprint lingers. The umbilical cord has no nerves. Not mother nor child feels the cut. It happened while I was distracted by the form of your lovely left foot. Down, down goes the root of your lovely left foot. One foot follows the other. You had in fact two feet. I also had two feet. We had our roads to walk. I set you on your separate path. You had not come of age. A child at three is not yet come of age. Separation is always a gamble. Who will fly into which universe? Imagine a pattern of knots and holes stretching from planet to planet, a cosmic macramé, a web sprung into being almost by accident, the design not discernible to those who walk on one spun filament each toward the other like clowns on a tightrope. They meet in the middle as if by accident. They stumble but they do not fall. The crowd cheers-- luck holds-- we do not fall after all. Slightly Cool, and Fleeting An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. —Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Panther" We walked. I think it was a sunny day. I think the sidewalk was a broken one, familiar to my son, not to me. He changes neighborhoods again, again. I did that in youth. His youth is passing, though. I raised the topic of my suicide, the one I promised in an old poem not to actualize. I have no current need of such a thing but, lo, the years are adding up. What if? He never asked me for the promise. I offered it, his father's ending seeming quite enough. Did it matter, such a promise based on such a fact? Matter to this man of middle age? Had it mattered when I made it? He wouldn't kill himself, he said. As for me, it was my choice. Not much to talk about. We're rational, the two of us. So he released me, having not imprisoned me. The thousand bars of Rilke's panther rise up from a white mist now to cage an aging mind and heart. Such a comfort, and such silliness. Translucent, misty bars. In the Imperative i. How authentically sourced were the tears from the eyes of the mother I was and was not? How valid the sobbing after movies with vivid and fictional children? Genuine, though, was the strict prohibition: take no pleasure in the offspring of others. The rule held: irrational, useless, necessary. Then was sanely abandoned. My son was long grown. But the years of strange discipline find their purpose. They speak to me: idiosyncratic woman, you were not blithe. ii. When the matter of human existence is bent toward gravity, allowed to fall unrepentant, sober, relieved into its own chance-driven destiny like the apparently ugly and deeply decided (joy-seeded) (distorted) (beautiful) triptychs of Francis Bacon, pushing itself into the psyche like a determined and violent god, the watcher attends. iii. Blithe we are not, who crawl, leap, fly elsewhere. See how the thought has striven and then stepped aside. Deny not the difference. iv. When I go there I don't know I'm there. Essential not to know to know not to know. Emerge afterward, though. Claim. (Note: click here to see a triptych by Francis Bacon.) |
Excerpt from the author's Afterword:
The poems in All the Difference make a composite self-portrait of sorts, partial, contradictory, layered by time. The work is flawed, as slices of perception and the efforts of language tend to be. With elements of sidestepping, shards of truth, and swaths of distortion: there it is. I was brought up to be a nice girl, a good girl, a fine student—ordinary and wholesome as white bread from the Sunbeam bakery a short walk from our house along the cement sidewalks of small town Minnesota. It was the 1940s, the 1950s. I had a mother and a father and four siblings. I went to church and to Catholic school. I entered the convent and stayed for six years, until it seemed a more authentic life might be lived "in the world." As it turned out, I "gave up" my child; and, by the way, I am a lesbian. I am aware that both of these facts can cause some people to feel like vomiting. Not everyone, of course. But even some of my family and friends who most love (and respect) me, who have no problem with lesbianism, no problem with unconventional paths in general, are on some level appalled that I made the decision not to continue the daily parenting of my little boy. They don't condemn me, not at all, but in some way—perhaps viscerally, perhaps cognitively—they are appalled. Decades after the fact, a few have told me. I happened upon the work of Francis Bacon late in life. I have been unpredictably and powerfully attracted to what has also repulsed me. I have learned to look at a piece of hung meat in one panel of a triptych that offers in another panel two bloodied distorted naked bodies (coupling? cuddling?) on a splayed piece of furniture—red, orange, white, black; a single thin strip of vertical green. The third panel (I read them from right to left) has a pair of witnessing figures; one seems to me to be the painter himself. I have developed a need to see what I was not raised to see: the violence of the beauty; the force, the vitality of matter; of flesh. Guided by philosopher Gilles Deleuze's work on Bacon, I can sometimes sense a metaphysical fecundity in these paintings—with matter, flesh, meat at the heart. To cut into the guts of reality, and see: bloody flesh undivided from beauty, which can be contemplated. Is this what an artist like Bacon, or an aesthetically inclined surgeon, or even an alert butcher in back of a chain grocery store, does? (While the rest of us might feel like running to vomit?) The astonishing fact of flesh: is it ever comprehended? Think: every human starts—tiny; so tiny—inside the body of another. We are so deeply animal. Appallingly; wondrously. There is a whirl of strangeness, incomprehensibility, and just plain good sense at center of my radical parenting decision. I try to look. Despite all vacillations, at the age of seventy I find I am neither complacent nor horrified. (Click here to see triptych by Francis Bacon. Click here to see a self-portrait of his.) |