The Shelter Series: Daisy Fried

In early February, my mother died. I held her hand and sang to her while she was in a coma in the hospital, was able to say goodbye. Did she hear me? I couldn’t go to her funeral because my disabled husband, who in his protective loyalty accompanied me to see her, could not make the grueling trip again. Then he was hospitalized for congestive heart failure. I and our 13-year-old daughter, who seems made of strength beyond her years, protected each other during his month in rehab. He’s a bit stronger now, and we’re all home, trying to keep from catching the virus. My father, ailing, who has lost the love of his life and partner of nearly 60 years, calls often. He’s lonely, but also, I’m pretty sure, goes on trying to protect me. Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus” describes the female of a species of octopus who secretes a paper-thin egg case. The poem’s three sentences of syntactic tangle enact the complex, imprisoning ferocity of maternal protection, each clause and branch of sentence so hooked into what complicates, reverses and rebuilds it that quotation seems difficult. But try this:

the intensively
   watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,—
   leaving its wasp-nest flaws
   of white on white, and close-
 
   laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
   a Parthenon horse,
   round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
   is the only fortress
   strong enough to trust to.

The “as if” in the knowing. That ferocious and hedging declaration. It’s also there, softer but no less intense, in the face of the mother in Alice Neel’s double portrait “Nancy and Olivia.” The mother’s uncertain hold on the baby. Her dread. But she will not let go.