Driving Away

I bend to kiss my mother goodbye.
"Are you going back to work?" she says.
"I'm going home," I answer.
"Work?" she says. "No, home."
"Work?" "Home." "Work?" "Home" "Work?" "Home."
She finally just shrugs, as if home 
were a ridiculous place to go at 7:15 
in the coming dark of a cool evening
in the middle of October.

Driving west, I watch the last vestiges
of pink and orange slip into nothing.
I try to visualize my mother's brain,
filled with blood 18 months ago,
now struggling to make connections.

Is it the size of an egg in the chicken house? 
or of a walnut fallen in the front yard 
of the house in Claysville, Alabama, 
where her family sharecropped— 
the happiest days of her life,
she once told me, months before the morning 
when she came to breakfast and asked me 
if I had found the sheets in the bathroom?
I had already fetched the towels from the dryer 
and managed to let her know this.

In the car, my daughter, wide-eyed, said,
"Daddy, she said, 'sidelake.’”  I know, 
I said, driving away, taking her to a swim meet 
and a graduation party and then home, 
only to return the next evening
to pick my mother up off the bathroom floor, 
dress her, and take her to the ER.

Are the neurons a frayed network 
where the ends don't quite meet?
A sixty-year-old Star Flower quilt 
with the stuffing exposed?
A dress worn too many Sundays?
A coat that has seen 
too many winters, stretched thin 
in the interest of shoes, books, corn?

What does it feel like to hear the words 
leave her mouth, different from the words 
in her egg-shaped or walnut-sized mind?
To have this fool just keep repeating "home,"
as if that were a place one could go.

Is it like trying to communicate 
with a 20-year-old son who knows it all, 
who just comes home on weekends to eat 
wash clothes, show off his newfound 
college ideas, use words like "social constructs,"
"hegemony," "deconstruction," "Derrida"?
This son, who is always already driving away.

Stuart Harris has taught English at Cumberland University since 1997.  Before that he taught English at Hunters Lane Comprehensive High School in Nashville, Tennessee, for eleven years.  A graduate of Belmont University, Dr. Harris has published poetry in a number of small literary magazines, a story in South Dakota Literary Review, and a story in an anthology of Tennessee writers.  He has also published a review of Clyde Edgerton’s novel Where Trouble Sleeps and an article on teaching World Literature in an interdisciplinary context in Tennessee English Journal.