My mother was a feminist

Don’t blame me, she’d say

turning on her heels out of the room

It’s a man’s world!

She was fourteen when the Depression hit.

Graduated high school at sixteen, matriculated

at UC but never went. Maybe it was money

maybe it was love or trouble at home

maybe it was emerging into life

during the Depression. She wanted

to become a natural science illustrator, to create

lovely prints of hand-painted blue racemes

gracefully shifting shadows of cattail leaves

gold-dusted stamen, shaded corollas, umbels . . . 

her eye guiding her hand dancing with floral form.

Look at the plant’s structure, Gene, she advised.

And learn the words—alternate leaves, petiole

how the stem joins the twig, do leaves twist or spiral

how they relate to other leaves, how light

sheaths them. Remember

blind hands catch what they feel.

                        But it wasn’t to be. She worked

as a real estate secretary, surviving

by becoming essential. I hated that.

The martyr role. Often smarter than her betters

a hot coal of contempt burned inside her.

If you’re not rich, you better appear useful,

Celine reminds us. She was always expert at her work.

Taught me to type, which has stood me in good stead.

She was, like generations of women, mulch

for the flame of feminine voices to come.

“It’s the law of the jungle, Gene,” she’d note

whenever I whined about how tough something was.

She bemusedly surveyed her children

from a New England reserve. Marcus Aurelius

was her favorite philosopher but her children

disappointed her. “Oh, let me do it,” she’d exclaim

shoving me aside at the kitchen sink. That didn’t

instill a great work ethic in me, I have to say. But love

makes up for a lot of parental mistakes.

Coming back from Searsville Lake

through the blond hills behind Stanford

I’d announce I had to go to the bathroom.

“Stop the car, Normand.” “Go behind that tree,” she’d direct.

“I don’t have any toilet paper,” I complained.

“Use a leaf. You think the Indians had paper?

But I don’t advise the red ones— poison oak.”

“What’s that look like?”

“Leaves come in threes, margins are lobed.”

“Hunh?”

Her interests ahead of her time: Watching

The Honeymooners on Sunday nights, my dad

in his recliner with a highball, she’d set up

and do yoga in front of the TV. She hated TV.

Went on anthropology digs

in alluvial creeks that ran through Belmont

before the shopping center was built.

She wanted to go to Egypt.

“Why don’t you?”

“I’ll see the world through your eyes,” she said.

I’ve yet to see Egypt and it’s still

a man’s world,

dying for a mother’s voice.