Undertow - A Personal History

The day Verandah Porche's poem pulled my mother to shore.

Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.

THE PLAN was to enjoy a meal together. The plan was always to enjoy a meal together, starting in the loft at Thanksgiving in 2018 when we had to clear off the dining table to find it and carve out space on the kitchen counter to cook. To be fair, those circumstances weren’t particular to my mother’s dementia; for years, her things had encroached like a rising sea. Even in my childhood, at the apartment in Brooklyn, I can remember asking if we might regain our table for my birthday cake. I must have been about eight years old. She guiltily agreed, clearing off stacks of papers, books, and watercolors. It’s touching to look back on and find I’d ever had that sway.

In 2019, Thanksgiving would be at her assisted living place on Long Island, and she was disgusted with Kim and me for not bringing an entire holiday meal from Vermont. She had loved the meal we’d cooked in the loft the year before, though I think she loved the cleared table more. Afterward, on the phone, she told me she’d been polishing it, hoping to attract friends to join her for leftovers. No one came.

To visit was to witness the rising tide. A tragedy of excesses: too many purchases, plans, and words tumbling and roiling as she’d order us around. When we came to help, she had me cleaning dust behind the refrigerator, lining bathroom drawers with contact paper, soaking labels off empty Advil bottles; nothing to be discarded. As sea level rose, her island grew smaller until she was stuck and angry on her little patch of ground.

AT HER assisted living residence, we arrive to join her in the elegant private dining room. Here, the residence often tucks us away with a white tablecloth and men who serve us in tuxedos, bringing coffee, non-dairy creamer, and sugar-free everything.

But this time, she hasn’t left her room in days, and when she rolls into the wide empty hallway, she is like a newborn just unswaddled, arms and legs flying out from her wheelchair. She cries in the elevator and arriving downstairs, fixates on the glass French doors in the dining room. She is concerned with who might come through them (with everyone plotting against her).

I soak in her desperation (an old habit) and grab my phone for a distraction. I want to anchor her with a recording from the past. I want our visit to amount to more than watching my mother wash out to sea.

“Brittle-boned, thigh deep and/Wading bird-like my father stood,” begins the poem “Undertow,” read by its poet Verandah Porche, streaming from my phone. “While ocean spit and bat the beach about.”

Mimi Weisbord. Title? C. 2005. Watercolor on paper. This is a huge painting (4’ tall?) she did in Greece. I don’t have the dimensions. I gave it to my cousin, who often visited Mom with us on Long Island.

MY MOTHER produced this recording of Verandah Porche in 1972. I’d found it online, archived by Pacifica Radio station WBAI-FM (streamable at Archive.org).

Finding it was thrilling. Kim had met Verandah at a conference, and together, they’d discovered this half-century-ago connection. Verandah told Kim how my mother encouraged her as a young poet. In 1972, she’d included her on her radio platform “Women Poets Reading” alongside poet-greats Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. She’d also brought Verandah to Joan Larkin’s in Brooklyn for a book launch or a poetry reading.

I’d recounted this reconnection to my mother in her room. She seemed to recall Verandah. But the story failed to dislodge her anxious, urgent crackle, her ever-broken signal.

Now, at this elegant dining table, Veranda’s youthful voice, age 26, cuts through the decades with an old soul’s cosmic prescience.

“Undertow” tells the story of a day when her parents nearly succumbed to the surf.

---

[...]
Ocean pulls the sand against each step.
Salt-blind and tripping,
Mama loosens her grip.
My father floats between her arms,
Surrendering limp and fading
To the seaward thrust.

---

TO BE honest, I’m not listening. I’m watching my mother. I’m oblivious to this poem’s themes. I’m poised and anxious, prepared for her to demand that I stop the reading, and I don’t want to before answering the question that each visit hangs in the air.

Can my mother surface? (Is she still in there?)

If I’d known this poem’s subject, I’d likely have avoided it. (Frail parents in the surf?)

But now I see “Undertow” was perfect.

The poem casts mortal aging and its struggles in Greek mythological terms. The poet’s mother (who is “no Circe’) tries and fails to rescue her father (“Perseus”). Lifeguards succeed. Heroic frailty is twice washed in love by a mother’s efforts and a daughter’s tender recounting. The poem concludes with her father at home, “Ear, like a sea shell/Pressed to the pillow,” safe in bed but still vulnerable:

---

[...]
The undertow, swirling about him,
Glides my father into sleep.

---

Settled in the dining room, my mother’s eyes — large dark sunken orbs — dash about the table where she rests her long fingers.

But when this poem launches, she suddenly stills.

Head turned, dipped toward me, she stares silently at my iPhone resting on the table.

I catch my breath as her head begins nodding to the poem’s rhythm.

Is she thoughtful with recognition? Or, as with music, caught by nostalgia for another time and place?

I want more.

I miss my mother’s mind.

She looks up and holds my eyes, deciding something.

I see it gather.

“It was so important for people to hear Verandah read,” she breaks through (like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus). “It made a big difference for her. I knew it would,” she concludes with haughty pride.

“Undertow”

(reproduced with permission)

Brittle-boned, thigh-deep, and
Wading bird-like, my father stood
While ocean bit and spat the beach about.
The sun bled on his back
Worn pale from years in hiding.

Now bronze and mole-speckled,
He watches the water leering--
Black, unloving mirror,
Unlike Mama's eyes, which tempered
To near sight, no longer see--
Gorgon, unsparing, mocks in a whirlpool,
Eye, shoulder, elbow, torso,
Perseus, my father.

No Circe,
Barebacked seahorse woman,
Mama paddles porpoise-like,
No Aphrodite,
Wet skirt clings to her billowing thighs,
Perhaps a second cousin to the sea,
She muses.

Above, the sun and moon
Divide the sky.
Late afternoon,
The ocean eats her young.

Caught in the throat
Of a gigantic inhalation,
My father topples,
Groping, crippled, for Mama,
Whose arms around him lug him
Trembling, toward the shore.

Ocean pulls the sand against each step.
Salt-blind and tripping,
Mama loosens her grip.
My father floats between her arms,
Surrendering limp and fading
To the seaward thrust.

He didn't drown in the mouth of a wave.
Nine long lifeguards
Answered Mama's shrieks.
Rushing from their canvas chairs,
They linked together
Elbow, shoulder,
And waded
To the place where my father floated
Numb and faceless.
They towed him back.

Safe in a home of bathtubs and seascapes,
Mama mails the postcards
She forgot to send.
Weary from an evening of crosswords
And comedies,
My father climbs the stairs.
Reduced to underwear,
Suntan fading,
He puts himself to bed.

Ear, like a seashell
Pressed to the pillow,
Hears the thrash and babble of a wave.
Blankets sprawl around him
Wrinkled like ripples.
Eyes folded
And falling,
The undertow, swirling about him, 
Glides my father into sleep 

Verandah Porche has three volumes of poetry, including The Body's Symmetry (Harper and Row, 1974), which includes "Undertow.” Verandah works as a poet-in-residence, performer, and writing partner from Total Loss Farm, the Vermont commune where she has resided since 1968. Among her awards and honors are the Vermont Arts Council's Award of Merit and Ellen McCollough-Lovell Award.

Take 3 minutes and listen to that amazing reading by Verandah Porche from 1972.