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The
Disguise of Flowers
The
deep, red cut on my father’s toe needs daily bandaging.
This is the slow, impatient healing of diabetes. Filled
with saline a square of gauze initiates repair. His foot
swells—hard and puffed to touch like a pinecone and each
toenail, yellowed, brittle, and crooked shows decay. As I
wrap the gauze, one piece holding the first, a looser,
thicker piece webs around one toe, the heel and then the
ankle, he tells me of the possibility of amputation.
My
father’s brother Stanley died the year I entered
kindergarten and began to add things together, take them
apart. At his funeral, arrangements of white carnations
and yellow lilies covered the lower part of the cedar casket
as if part of his body were missing, or disjointed. Amazed
at the stark balance of the halves, half-body, half-flower
bed, I wondered if this covering were more a disguise than
display.
I
learn the true story of Stanley’s leg tonight, bandaging
dad’s unfortunate foot twenty years afterwards: there
was no illusion of separateness at the funeral, nothing but
truly vacant places where the legs would have been.
Reparations
This
winter, the house erupts with a series of leaks originating in
the upstairs bathroom. Buckets in the foyer harvest the
rainstorm that descends from the ceiling. This has been the
pattern lately: the argument is the same with only the slight
rearrangement of things, such that spaces have not changed.
Sheet rock loosened from the wall reveals a spot of
exposed pipe. My brothers and father work with such
deliberation their work has a scrutiny to it. There is no
talking between them, only goggles and fire to mask the men
they really are. So precise is the mending, this
safeguarding of parts, welding copper to copper. There is
such harmony in the repair of it— how selfless and
burden-free some things are.
Threads
Opening
the walk-in closet filled with the stuff of living—I
think one day we will have to sell the house. In the
meantime, closing the door as a hatbox falls, there are no
poems about choosing the appropriate dress for your mother
to be cremated in.
As
a schoolchild, I learned when there is anything left over you
must carry it. I’m taught to love what lingers—the
timpani in a slow concerto, the echo of a lost voice, the
sound, three rooms away of a breath stopping on its last
chord. Paying its debt, nighttime closes its eyes and gives
itself up to morning. I think she is sleeping, so best let
her sleep. Keep the cat from waking her.
I
recognize my mother’s hands on the walls of our house.
These are her threads; the threads I hold onto as I make my
way, always there is a path back.
My
first act as an orphan: I choose the sapphire dress, the best
color I know depicting the moon’s shadow as it
spirals away from the earth.
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