A fun exercise…
For my Brit Lit II take home final, in which I turned this Paul Muldoon poem into a piece of flash fiction.
He knelt by the grave of his mother and father. The memory of something filled his mouth—dill, or tarragon, perhaps, one of those always freshly sprinkled over the bowls of something they cooked. He could barely tell one from the other. It suffocated him, the memory, the strength of it. And then he remembered her—the woman with the deep green eyes and elegant hands, her bony wrists and shoulders draped beneath the fur of a sea-otter. Where was it? Portland. Portland, Maine, or—yes, Portland, Oregon. But why should he remember her now, in front of the gray barren graves? The taste of her mouth, the small pickled gherkin she brought him once in a jar, laughing.
He remembered their long talks, about the Monarch butterflies and their milkweed-hunger. How the earth and the sky would darken when they came down in their fluttering dark wings, so that you could barely tell one from the other. “A wing-beat that may trigger off the mother and father of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher with the force of a hurricane.”
“Milkweed and Monarch ‘invented’ each other,” she told him.
He looked up, out of his memories, at the tiny white flowers in the shoots of the Cow’s parsley in the samovar in front of the grave. He’d mistaken his mother’s name, “Regan”, for “Anger.” As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father, he realized that he could barely tell one from the other.
(Source: paintedfictions)
