The Aunt Molly Poems

Aunt Molly on First Communion Day When I Was Seven

Uncle Lou’s right hand and arm were paralyzed.
A scattered-shot Nazi bullet surprised
his men and they came home broken or dead.

So the family history always said.
Before my time. I knew just the handshake—
His left, your right: a harmless twisting snake.

But this time, the hand conveyed a pill,
folded nicely from a 100-dollar bill,
or like a paper checker, to my hand

as a little secret that he had planned.
He said, “First Communion will always mean
Keep your soul pure, your mind sharp, your hands clean.”

Afterwards, having unraveled the checker piece,
my mind purchasing items without cease,
I began smoothing the many creases

knowing now how he’d charmed all his nieces
and nephews and now me, too, bought and sold.
It’s bitter to be seven and so old.

Downstairs, awaiting me: the Grand Inquisitor,
and she seeming every bit as sinister.
“How much, if you don’t mind telling me?”

I did mind and lied. “He gave me a twenty.”
“Give it your mom or sure you’ll lose it.”
O! It did get lost, dear Molly, and me with it.
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Aunt Molly, in Her Eighties, in the 1970s, Watching

    Saturday Night at The Movies


i.
When the Tinman utters that now he knows
“I have a heart,” she cries and blows her nose
and holds her blanket nearer to her chin,
“because,” he says haltingly, “it’s breakin.’”
Then the Great Oz lets his great balloon rise
and the tears glisten again in her eyes.

ii.
When she watches O. Welles as Harry Lime,
she wants to throttle him anew each time.
And when J. Cotton kills his former friend,
to her it is never a fitting end.
She asks of film in all its artsy guise,
For justice, poetic and otherwise.

iii
Irish in ev’ry Hollywood classic
make her angry and a little airsick.
Cagney, Gleason, Tracy, O’Brien–
their portrayals are as near Orion
to the very truth that she so well knows–
the Irish: Sentimental cynics in bad clothes.
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Fashion Changes

When Aunt Molly arrived from overseas,
hems of women’s skirts fell below the knees.

Time, that sea where the future makes its jumps,
let Molly die when skirts just covered women’s rumps.
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Aunt Molly’s Secrets

To find solutions to her search
Aunt Molly often went to church.

She rarely found a right answer
Until she married a strange dancer.

Uncle Teddy, she told me once,
Was quite a lover, but a dunce.

He taught her the private passions
In long happy noon-time sessions.

He left with another person.
Molly’s life began to worsen.

Returned she sadly then to church,
Lamenting in her fourth-pew perch.
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Aunt Molly On the Train

I sat beside her on a train.
While she slept, I watched drops of rain
Scurry sideways on foggy glass.

I was a child of ten and bored
traveling to visit Our Lord
by hearing a Pope’s solemn mass.

When she wasn’t sleeping, her hands
moved wool or beads to other lands:
pagan peoples dining on grass.

If I spoke, she’d “I’ve lost a stitch.”
If again, she’d “I’ve lost count which.”
–She meant rosary’s prayerful pass.

That six hours’ stretch of a child’s time
was an unchanging arid clime.
I begged water; she gave no glass.
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Aunt Molly’s Chores

We never walked in Molly’s moccasins
or confronted her myriad demons.

We just made her an object of our fun
when all the silly chores for her were done.

But what of her protracted loneliness?
Why her facile recourse to gruffness?

We endured Molly as one of life’s tasks
and never asked what lie beneath her masks.

We never wondered how much she might infer
of our irony or our whispered slur.

She thought us her good nieces and nephews
because Father never let us refuse

her bidding us do her weary errands—
which mounted, so it seemed, to the thousands:

Go to the chemist’s for these prescriptions;
ask the library for these subscriptions.

deliver these jars of home-made jams;
collate the ten pages of these programs.

Her life, her committees, her needs, her schemes
presided over our childhood regimes.

We grew to love her without affection
and bore impatience without detection.

And we hated her like a mortal foe—
the Saturday source of our silenced woe.

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Aunt Molly Votes For Kennedy, 1960

He was handsome and charming,
And said nothing alarming.

He had a smile and made jokes
And was like regular folks.

He was rich. but never proud
And never ignored the crowd:

He kissed babies and shook hands,
Walked unguarded in the stands.

AND he was Catholic and Irish
Like someone from the parish.

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Aunt Molly at the State Fair

When good Aunt Molly went to the state fair
she had us push her in a rented chair
with twin coach wheels—not a wheelchair per se,
but a plush armchair she sat in all day.
It had a fringed shade-top and all was plaid
except Molly, stripes-and-polka-dots clad.
She was being colorful, she explained.
But the look of each pushing nephew was inevitably strained.

She could have walked and talked, but liked the shade
that rendered wide-brimmed hats quite retrograde.
She wasn’t old yet, nor cantankerous,
but still alive, awake and curious
about everything she could see
except us peasants in her sovereignty.
Mom and Dad shook their heads at our complaints:
we martyred ourselves like one of her saints.
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Aunt Molly in the Car

She always sat shot-gun
and Mom soothed with “What fun!”
as we squeezed in the back.
Others in the back-back
looked at what we had passed.
wishing Dad to ride fast
so collywobs stayed clear
and none of us need fear
a vomitous event.
That’s how car-rides were spent.

But Aunt Molly up front,
always ready and blunt,
coaxed Dad to drive slowly
and made traveling unholy.
A station wagon filled
with nervous people thrilled
to find an attraction
in any distraction,
like singing or word games,
Twenty Questions, Famous Names.

Mom was always MC
who sometimes called on me
to recite poems by Frost
I always felt star-crossed.
Mom would call on and ask
for others to do some task
to pass the time for us.
Why’d she do that to us?
Molly gave no pleasure:
Why was she their treasure?

Jokes and talk would volley
in rides sans Aunt Molly.
Noise was spontaneous;
we were insanely us.
Ev’ry ride then was fun,
But that would be undone
when Molly took her seat
and noises became neat.
Why di’n't Dad resist her:
She was only a sister?

Aunt Molly At The Dinner Table

Her Irish voice was soft
except after she coughed
if and when she forgot
that her tea was too hot.

Indeed the soft voice of an old softy
except when she voiced something so lofty
that the whiskers on her arms would arise
as if thrilled at articulate surprise.

Then Dolly become shrill
and lost her vocal skill
and sounded quite distraught
that she had at last caught

a fish of God’s truth that no-one heeded,
which she fastidiously repeated,
till one of us brash nephews or nieces
said, “Oh, dear Auntie, we love you to pieces!”
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Aunt Molly Votes For Reagan With An Absentee Ballot

She was quite sick but not quite dead
And Ronald Reagan had gone to her head.

She dictated the checks on the ballot
As if she pounded Solomon’s mallet:

Said no to the referendum for schools.
Abstained from voting judges in: “All fools!”

Chose aldermen each for his Irish name
and a Congressman with slogans so lame

his T.V.commercials got a great laugh.
“Vote for me, and I’ll vote on your behalf.”

Auntie was cantankerous and afraid
her adopted country was being betrayed

by those it had helped the most.
She worried that the liberal Communist ghost

that McCarthy had long-time laid to rest
was now wearing a red, white and blue vest

that hid the ghostly hues of its intent:
to take America and re-invent.

Aunt Molly was sick, but not dead.
And Reagan was inside her head.
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Mom Remembers Aunt Molly

Our mom, now just deceased,
Told a Molly tale once.
Said she could be a beast
But mostly was a dunce

In dementia, dear Mom
Told us of Molly’s prom
with Dad, her handsome date
and even he came late.

But he brought the corsage
Created the mirage
That ev’ry manly friend
Would happily expend

For her, a dance or two.
When the evening was through
She discovered in smirks
brother’s puppetry works.

Now out for the slaughter
She gave him no quarter
And remained in a snit
called him a pile of shit

and didn’t forgive him
until under a whim
he bought Italian ices
thus ending her crisis..

Dear Mom told us quite sadly
Pop never did her badly:.
He wanted her to dance
So he gave her that chance.

Here Mom began to weep
And quieted to sleep.
We tip-toed out the room
Awed by a brother’s doom.

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Chloe Speaks of Aunt Molly

When Grandpa died, Aunt Molly took it worst,
and in the funeral line, she walked first.

I was a girl of ten; my grief obscure.
She was a woman, and her grief was sure
and open, for she wept without surcease

and I felt for her as a loving niece
might.

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But a secret I knew never to speak
was that Grandfather thought all girls weak,

and dear Aunt Molly grew up with such a pain
that family for her was a ball and chain
that she dragged behind her without surcease

and I thought of her as an observant niece
might.

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“My grief obscure” means simply I knew not
my own emotions about where or what.. . . .

Simply, I felt two strange but equal things:
Sadness lives in the music a choir sings,
But my gladness lives yet without surcease

from when I looked to her as a wayward niece
might.

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So why in later years did she not see
that America’s girls needed to be free?

Why did she rail at all the bra-burning,
all the male-bashing, family-churning
–those feminists fighting without surcease?

And I felt for her then as an angry niece
might.

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She knew more than any woman I’ve known
how crooked and self-centered men are prone.

Yet she honored them; she grieved even him
who made her life a thing on the rim,
more like a steam iron that smooths without surcease

and now I feel sorry as an aging niece
might.

Monsignor Coyle Gives Aunt Molly’s Eulogy

Friday, I brought her the viaticum.
When I entered the room, her eyes seemed numb.
But the Lord on her lips
gave over to her quips
and she was no longer silent or dumb.
“Ah, ‘tis the monsignor, why have you come?”

Not easy to tell someone about to die,
“Can’t avoid destiny, but one should try.”
“Not true, padre, not true
I’ve been cooked through and through.
I have no regrets; I won’t even sigh.
All I’m waiting for is the last good-bye.”

“You’ve stopped eating,” said I in gravest voice.
“Meals here make Lenten fasting my first choice.
In vein, they keep me alive, see?”
She pointed then to her I-V.
“But God asks of you each day to rejoice.
And even old, our lives are not our toys.”

“I am long welcomed into His Kingdom
and to His care willingly I succumb.”
“But, Molly, you’ve no right.”
“Padre” she said, “you listen tight.
You’ve brought me the holy viaticum.–
That’s Latin for preps for a journey. Now mum!”

I look out now upon this assemblage
and see Molly was no mere appendage.
In this huge happy family.
let her be today’s homily.
She saw our lives were merely a passage
to God’s kingdom with the Church as His mighty bridge.

Let us pray.

Aunt Molly Meets The Beatles

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They came to the States with strange hair
And dark-velvet-collared jackets
And they sang and screamed “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

And Aunt Molly was mortified
When they did the Sullivan ‘Shew’
And from then was always satisfied

That these mop-head creeps were freaks
Who wore tight pants and made girls mad
And had sex in their dimpled cheeks.

ii.
Then silly John mentioned Jesus
And “O Christ ‘s Blood!” said Molly,
“Nothing he says now can please us.”

Big Deal! His words hadn’t before,
for he was unforgivably Brit.
And then he came out against War.

Meanwhile, the other lads said nought.
Later, learning peace from a yogi,
They took their act offstage and fought.

iii
Then with Molly already dead,
Came the cold night in December:
when Lennon lay in his last bed .

I imagine him meeting Molly.
And she so thoroughly annoyed
That her cold sneer made John jolly.

Ever the righteous pains i’’the ass,
He and Molly, Molly and him
Would never give the other a pass.

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Aunt Molly As Emblem

Aunt Molly lived a full four score
but she is gone
consumed by the fire of time.

Her days were spring leaves turned autumn
but they are gone
consumed by the fire of time.

Her friends were small twigs of joy and hurt
and they are gone
consumed by the fire of time.

her marriage was one branch
stripped of a bark long gone,
consumed by the fire of time.

Her brother was a chestnut
that is cracked and gone
consumed in the fire of time.

Her god was one whole tree
felled and gone
and consumed, like all of us, in the slow fire of decay.