Yarrow House

Magna

Over the stiff-springed parlor couch
hung a hand-tinted photo
of grandma and Magna, her daughter,
Magna, with long blond hair, 
dressed in white, blue ribbons 
at her waist and tying up her curls. 
Above the pump organ, the dusty 
Christmas cactus, the braided rugs we 
pretended were islands and skated between 
across the speckled linoleum,
Magna watched us from her gilt frame,
slightly out of focus.

Forever blue-ribboned and a girl
while I fingered the beads of my years,
Magna out-paced me, was older than I 
could ever be. And years ago had died.
In the kitchen aunts would whisper it.
Her man, impatient, once had cut her
heavy hair, wore at her love,
knew her so well he didn’t have to care.

They whisper it. My father
never whispered though, “Sweet Magna,
when she lay dying in her cast-iron
bed, a yellow bird sang at her window.”
A man can say a name
to make you remember it at any time
for years. I searched the photo
for that name. Clung to the wall
trying for her eyes,
which wouldn’t look at me.

Magna, the secret one.
She slid away, played
the child’s game, hide and seek,
went off into the branches 

to read a book. Did she read?
Or like the other aunts drift 
aimless and given, into a marriage,
into a family, into her death
as blank as clouds? I
would be like her, a mystery,
and vanish before they noticed.

She was a gate I swung on now
and then, wondering, guessing
at the home she’d left behind.
Stepchild with an unknown father,
dying of pneumonia after childbirth,
the child dead too
and buried together. And the yellow bird 
sang. My god, he said it like a promise.
After all, a yellow bird sang.

Published in The Immigrant, Court Street Press, (1984).

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Onetime reproduction for non-resale purposes permitted by the author with the following credit line: by J Yarrow