Light and darkness also play out in Benet's poem "Budapest Gothic," which ultimately is about her mother. The poet describes a city scene in the first stanza: the leafless trees, the "black rain," the street "habitually bleak,"
and the buildings, repositories of dreams,
rise on ambition laid to waste,
but in the cracks between the polished stones
there are signs of life,
cigarettes smoked to the bitter end.
There follows a stanza about "the women I used to know," then comes the stanza which ends talking of Benet's mother:
Me, I left with her motherly blessing.
Here, the garden is blooming, like my house.
There are the drought-tolerant trees,
the furniture to withstand stormy kids.
And here, late in the season, among the flowers,
signs of her life: weeds, small clouds,
dark openings and cracks in the splendid light.
It may be that, with the "dark openings and cracks in the splendid light" as the signs of her life, the poet's mother stands in these poems as a marker for all the things that cannot be; she is not, so far as we can tell, "The Queen of Romania," yet she may be another "grande dame of rococo sorrow," of whom the poet could say:
... Where you live,
there is always the heat, that ponderous
dead calm of August.
Can we imagine that the mother was one of these women, and that the poet was the child (from "Harvest"):
The women, dressed in black, bring soup
in tiered tins, bread in stiff linens.The child is mute as she sits
under the whorled branches of an oak.
She dips her piece of bread in milk....
The poem ends:
The child's dreams are a tangle of stars
sprouting green skies. To her hunger
there is no end.
Continued at MAPMAKER - 4, below
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