Ars Poetica
By Mary Kay Rummel
Because my mother’s mother carried her Irish language
across a stormy Atlantic to St. Paul
Because my great grandfather who lived to be 100
sang in Irish as he bounced us on his bony leg
Because on the front porch of my grandmother’s house
the cousins, all named Mary,
learned 100 names for green from rebel songs
Because I lived sixty years before I learned my mother’s father
died drunk under the hooves of a horse he was driving
Because my cousin, Sheriff O’Connell, who took bribes
from Chicago gangsters, gave money to my widowed grandmother
Because when I read about him in St. Paul histories
I thought saint not sinner
Because my father’s tiny mother came from Galway
with a family too full of priests and nuns
Because she loved to talk in the way of Irish women
over tea and toast at small tables
Because I grew up in the quotidian music of women’s murmuring
close to the ground where the world begins
Because men were either silent or overbearing
I lived my girl’s life with Ann of Green Gables and Little Women
the bus plying the Old Fort Road to school
became my Bridge at San Luis Rey
Because art and music were in the church
I thought beauty belonged to God
Because roots of my young astonishment
cling to my inner life like the pine cone—growing
even after fire, living scales
Because in the convent we were told to be silent
I picked up a pen
Because of my heart’s homelessness
Because a poem waits for me to see it—
the way Monet’s last painting
his exact pink and red primroses
waited for his uncurtained vision
Because love will not let go
Because words un-write as they are written
un-speak as they are spoken
Because my granddaughters
listen to my tales of trolls and beanstalks—
their eyes pools where words sink and grow
the way I once listened to the old ones
I do not want to die without writing
my unwritten watery universe.