In the canyon, one day
When I was young
I suppose Father had gone to work
I found Mom in bed with sheets
Of typing—sheets and sheets of typing
She had To Kill a Mocking Bird there too
And she read to me and talked about the opening
The beginning that hooks you
The beginning you have to read, you have to share—
Because she longed to write the beginning
She read her sheets about a buckeye girl
A gem herself, whose father was a teacher
Walking to school on a crisp fall morning
Seeing her first black boy
She nicknamed Toast
The story began to unfold—images rolled
Off the pages with the schoolgirl in love with
The young grocer.
And then the beginning ended
With only outline to fill the moments-in-between
There was the final chapter, the fire
At the town gazebo with Toast the hero
I longed for all the moments-in-between
That could not be written
Until a few more people died
Mom was pretty sure her step Grandmother
Had done away with her first husband
And the moments-in-between would
Flicker like flames around that intuition
Until the real buckeye girl exposed her
The sheets were to be almost 500 pages
But Mom began to write children’s books
Buckeye Girl would be converted to a
YA—publishing lingo for Young Adult
Losing the moments-in-between
Buckeye Girl would be reduced
To the standard 250 page YA mindset
And still I, a man then, would have to wait
For moments-in-between
Until a few more people died
But illness took its grip
Mom struggled against its steady pull
While pain and incessant
Weakening of body
Further reduced the moments-in-between
Afterward, Ruth and I cleaned out the “office”
Where Mom pounded out story after story
With Buckeye Girl waiting in the wings
Until she could only endure in bed with sheets
Of story replaced by mindless crossword puzzles
Box after box, sheet after sheet
Sifting sorting until sometimes
It was too much and
I screamed at the ceiling
With piles of manuscripts never published
And Buckeye Girl?
In that moment when
Illness finally had its way
Had Vanished
With all the moments-in-between
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