Karen George
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Grueling, Grilling A booth away, two men rehash a Euchre game played who knows when. In jeans and flannel shirts they sip coffee, fuss with torn sugar packets and stick stirrers. One admits, I should have led with my heart. Sounds like a country song, but I know what he means. After every hand my sisters and I play with Mom, she mulls over moves, questions her strategies, wonders where I went wrong, though she often wins the game. We remind her it’s her turn, to let that previous hand go, but she’s unable, so we wait while she reels back in time, eyes fixed, scrutinizes red and black suits corralled in sets and sequences. Ruminating, her psychiatrist calls it, explains how cows chew their cud—puke food from their first stomach, the rumen. Ruminating, a word we won’t say. We can’t talk her out of whatever obsesses her at the moment: whether the aide made her bed correctly, if they’ll bring her Ativan by the time she wants it, if the oxygen coursing through her cannula will suffice. ** Recurring Dream My teeth fall out, one at a time, then two, three—hunks with bloody gums. I want help, but no one will take me to the hospital. They act as though it’s no big deal, or narrow their eyes, back away like I’m contagious. My husband, a few months before he died, broke a tooth off his dentures while in the hospital. He was so secretive about them; I’d almost forgotten his teeth weren’t real. I found an emergency dental practice that repaired them in a day—he’d saved the artificial fragment. The day without them, torture. He didn’t want to talk, hid his mouth with his hands. It pained me to see how shamed he felt. He’d lost his teeth in his early twenties during WWII when his Jeep hit a land mine. I wake in a hot flush. My tongue flicks frantic over my teeth, my gums—all packed safe in place. An ache remains, a hum like phantom pain. ** Stringed Theory I’ve always loved stringed instruments, even before I knew their honeyed names: violin, viola, cello, bass, unaware of how plucking, bowing, striking formed the tune. They suffuse the background like a canvas of sky other instruments silhouette. Dad played saxophone and clarinet, Mom the piano—music that ferried me places, but from the beginning it was strings. When the dulcimer, ukulele, harp found me, I noted colours and moods. As a preteen I dove into rock and folk with electric and acoustic guitars, later bluegrass unveiled banjo, mandolin, and fiddle. With my Lebanese husband, the sitar and oud were tessellated in. One night in my early forties, six feet from a woman playing Celtic songs on a fiddle, everything tapers to a pinpoint, the hair on my arms and nape rises. A window opens into another time where I play the fiddle. The ebb and flow, drag and push, of bow across the strings tickles, vibrates through the instrument and my chin, neck, fingers, to my heart, absorbs my body—muscles and tendons in my arms, wrists, upper back, and core. Watching how varied motions correspond to distinct sounds, tempos. Vibrations open me on a cellular level—the way newborns detect the tone of their mother’s voice from the resonant swirl. ** Growing Aural The eighth day of her second trimester she hears whiz of fluorescent light tubes framing the mirror. Absorbs thrum of tires on concrete, pitched higher on the suspension bridge, steel, pulsing the wheel. The keypad strums beneath her fingers in tune with the dim hum of the desk clock, second hand sweeping round. Refrigerator rumble joins with insect drone and her husband's snore, croons her to sleep. Each day some new cadence: street lamps, radio static, but she can't always tell where a hum comes from. Wants to sift, clarify hosts of concurrent notes. Catalogues them in a notepad she carries everywhere. Her own murmur underscores all strains as bone, blood, and sinew hatch and curl. ** Early Autumn Planting Fifteen saplings lean close in a circle, root balls wrapped in burlap, limbs twined to six-foot trunks. Deep holes await them—city diggers on a lunch break. Paused at a light, I inhale the sweet soil unearthed, imagine how roots and branches will spread and thicken. Their leaves, marbled red, presage fall. I accelerate and brace for another anniversary of your death—one more year without you. ** Illumination I can’t imagine life without sunlight, moonlight, even radiance streaming from a streetlamp. When gingko fan leaves or yellow tulip petals turn translucent from sunray saturation. Winter, when it’s too cold to walk, but you want to see trees or a lake, sun heats the car’s interior—a cozy place to read a book, draft a poem, call a friend. My favourite part of light—reflection. Sun in my high kitchen window, through glass bottles of azure, rose, garnet, jade, gold with diamonds stripes, wave designs, cast coloured shadows on the living room wall, traveling further right with time. How the shadows of spirals on metal chairs & coffee table fall to the floor—mirror, layer the curves & swirls of wood grain. The way when a tree shimmies, a body of water vibrates a twin, sending shivers up your arms. ** Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), and forthcoming from Kelsay Books Caught in the Trembling Net (2024). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her short story collection, How We Fracture, which won the Rosemary Daniell Fiction Prize, is forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press in January 2024. Her work appears in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Cultural Daily, and Poet Lore. www.karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/ |
