Driving Home Between Two Mountains
Leslie St. John | Poetry, Spring 2025
The first star in a recent sundown sky
is the pin-prick blotch of my mother’s stroke.
I study the MRI, make the neurologist explain
the words global, endocarditis, brain bleeds,
and repeat them back like memorizing
directions that will take us somewhere safe.
I examine the white exploding star
in my mother’s brain that swallowed
her speech, my lifeline across 2,000 miles,
the southern song of my name in her mouth,
two syllables slowly descending stairs
to meet me. My mother’s voice
first Om as I floated in her dark womb,
myself only a pin-prick of white light.
At forty-four, I am eight fat states away
from her small hands and milky-blue eyes.
I steer the car between two mountains,
black shadows rising to meet a silver moon,
single star, maybe a planet, perched
there longer than our lifetimes
(Where will she go after?
What loneliness is coming for me?)
I brake for the black outside my window
and review my memory of the MRI:
first splinter-star in a darkening sky,
crystals of my mother’s continuous strokes,
just hanging
in space, blotting what was once clear
and awake.
__________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“A trace fossil is evidence of life, etchings and indentations of existence. My mother is where life began. I am her evidence, her stone-and-bone-stamped legacy. "Driving Home Between Two Mountains" came to me on a familiar road, flanked by two mountains, dividing work and home, public performance and private reflection. In the whiplash week of starting Fall quarter, getting the call "to come home now," flying to Arkansas, shuffling doctors and medical jargon and hospital rooms with their beeps and chords and accompanying stink, and dreading my departure--my body pulling away from her body--then doing it, leaving her and returning to California, I did not pause to process. I couldn't. But one evening, driving through my shedding portal, traffic dissolving into the night sky, my eye gathered white blotches in black...star and stroke. This image was a gift that unspooled the poem, where I reflect on my mother's strokes, how language connects and fails us, and my attempts to face an inevitable loss just down the road. The poem is a trace fossil of more time given, written on the sky.”
Leslie St. John, creator of Prose & Poses, is a poet and educator living in San Luis Obispo, CA. Her poems and essays have been published in Apersus Quartery, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Indiana Review, Linebreak, ONE Art, Oxford American, Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, and Verse Daily. Her books include Beauty Like a Rope (Independently published, 2012) and Art of Letting Go (Independently published, 2015). When she's not teaching at Cal Poly or one of her many movement classes, writing circles, and retreats, you'll find her musing at a café or hiking with her husband and dog. Connect with her at proseandposes.com.
Driving Home Between Two Mountains
Leslie St. John | Poetry, Spring 2025
The first star in a recent sundown sky
is the pin-prick blotch of my mother’s stroke.
I study the MRI, make the neurologist explain
the words global, endocarditis, brain bleeds,
and repeat them back like memorizing
directions that will take us somewhere safe.
I examine the white exploding star
in my mother’s brain that swallowed
her speech, my lifeline across 2,000 miles,
the southern song of my name in her mouth,
two syllables slowly descending stairs
to meet me. My mother’s voice
first Om as I floated in her dark womb,
myself only a pin-prick of white light.
At forty-four, I am eight fat states away
from her small hands and milky-blue eyes.
I steer the car between two mountains,
black shadows rising to meet a silver moon,
single star, maybe a planet, perched
there longer than our lifetimes
(Where will she go after?
What loneliness is coming for me?)
I brake for the black outside my window
and review my memory of the MRI:
first splinter-star in a darkening sky,
crystals of my mother’s continuous strokes,
just hanging
in space, blotting what was once clear
and awake.
________________________________________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“A trace fossil is evidence of life, etchings and indentations of existence. My mother is where life began. I am her evidence, her stone-and-bone-stamped legacy. "Driving Home Between Two Mountains" came to me on a familiar road, flanked by two mountains, dividing work and home, public performance and private reflection. In the whiplash week of starting Fall quarter, getting the call "to come home now," flying to Arkansas, shuffling doctors and medical jargon and hospital rooms with their beeps and chords and accompanying stink, and dreading my departure--my body pulling away from her body--then doing it, leaving her and returning to California, I did not pause to process. I couldn't. But one evening, driving through my shedding portal, traffic dissolving into the night sky, my eye gathered white blotches in black...star and stroke. This image was a gift that unspooled the poem, where I reflect on my mother's strokes, how language connects and fails us, and my attempts to face an inevitable loss just down the road. The poem is a trace fossil of more time given, written on the sky.”
Leslie St. John, creator of Prose & Poses, is a poet and educator living in San Luis Obispo, CA. Her poems and essays have been published in Apersus Quartery, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Indiana Review, Linebreak, ONE Art, Oxford American, Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, and Verse Daily. Her books include Beauty Like a Rope (Independently published, 2012) and Art of Letting Go (Independently published, 2015). When she's not teaching at Cal Poly or one of her many movement classes, writing circles, and retreats, you'll find her musing at a café or hiking with her husband and dog. Connect with her at proseandposes.com.