Competent well-educated
A technologist a scientist
She reserved those terms for her husband
Though well she merited them herself
Knowledge of and beyond
Education profession and babies
But she had trouble with certain words
Which she could not pronounce with conviction
Velcro condominium Chik-fil-a
New words not current in a youth
Of Great Depression and all-consuming war
But she was not stymied by neologism alone
It can’t be just intellect she said to me once
It can’t only be intellectual
Speaking of our religious beliefs
One could hear that she suspected
An r sound lurking somewhere in intellectural
Never specifying what stood beyond intellect

She had converted in order to marry
My Irish Catholic father
He boisterous and commanding
She retiring and self-conscious
Owing perhaps to the poverty of her childhood
A Protestant of Calvinist tendency
She took a dim view of many things
But she took me to hear the symphony
And when she would see her youngest brother
They would laugh in torrents of weeping laughter
Yet I never saw her weep in earnest
Her spirit strong and resistant
Her stoical body relentless
Long after her spirit had departed
Obdurate power within the withered frame
Her body refusing to surrender
Until like a fussy baby
At last it consented to sleep