E. Ethelbert Miller has written the piece as a block of prose, but first presents a quote:
Whoever said men
hit harder when women
are around, is right.
– Yusef Komunyakaa
After, he follows with the piece:
You push the door open not knowing
what to expect. She sits in a chair next
to her hospital bed. Just sitting. How long?
Before you can even enter the room a big
smile of recognition kisses her lips before
she kisses you. Her seamstress eyes survey
your clothes. You’re a rhinestone of a son
slipping between her shaking hands. As the
sparkle leaves her eyes she withdraws under
her hospital robe. So small she looks. So
small she is. You want to leave but you just
came. It’s just you and her. You’re overmatched.
Her moods change so quick you can’t avoid
her jabs. There’s bitterness in each blow. She
has you against the wall. You’re fighting with
her again. This is sick you say to yourself.
You want to leave but the bell never rings.
You’re trying to love her too much. You’re
losing another round.
I began the piece without first reading the quote that precedes it, and, after rereading the piece with the quote, I was given much more insight into the route Miller was giving his poem.
The prose is offered as an observation from the point of view of a man with his hospitalized mother. She has some sort of sickness that makes her forget things, most likely some stage of Alzheimer’s, and, instead of making her weak in this moment, Miller sort of paints her image as that of a fighter-but not a fighter against what you would initially believe.
He writes the piece as if the son and mother are fighting against one another, and for what reason? My thought is that he would do this to describe exhaustion as something more tangible, more physical.
I found the line, ‘You want to leave but the bell never rings.‘ to be very hard-hitting when paired directly after with, ‘You’re trying to love her too much.‘
Miller is basically saying that there are many ways to look at how this sickness is affecting everyone’s life so greatly. I could feel in my body the expression of just being over wanting to do something in this piece. Just-just being tired, you know? The feeling of exhaustion in this prose was so well-written that, even though it isn’t one of my favorites by Miller, it still stuck in my brain. He almost needed a separate sense besides the five he was given to describe the way both characters in the piece felt, and he nailed them as characters themselves.
This piece was honestly just so overwhelming. There was so much going on, and Miller added many underlying descriptions that built the characters he was talking of, for example the lines about the mother’s seamstress hands shaking, then the comparison following, talking of how her hands let the son slip- none of these descriptions were directly needed, but they added so much to the story he wove within these lines.
