Bernadette Geyer
What Barbara Told Us
She waited until we finished
our self-guided tour of the husks of buildings that endured in the former Warsaw Ghetto. She waited until we had shot our fill of photographs, switched out rolls of film. Our steps were caught in the molasses of history when she began to speak: It was never a moral question—bribery and stealing. If the Polish stole, it was from the Russians, or the Germans, or the Austro-Hungarians. If the government was cheated, that was okay, because it wasn’t theirs. She offered this not as apology or excuse, but fact, just as the bullet-pocked wall would not apologize for its blemishes as we skimmed our fingertips over its marred, but proud, skin. Heat Lightning
The nights it happened, we’d set up chairs
in the back yard, watch the skies instead of the black & white TV handed down from our grandfather when he upgraded to a console. We bugged our eyes as wide as we could, tried hard not to blink for fear we’d miss one of the flashes outlining the clouds that separated us from the stars, the clouds that acted as a screen against which we could watch this display of nature’s fireworks. Foolish as pups, we tried to predict where the light would flare next looked there instead of where the flash last occurred, because we’d been told that lightning never strikes the same place twice. Even now, I find it just as hard to witness radiance as it happens, just as hard to stop myself from trying. Thumbelina's Mother Speaks: To the Witch
-- from The Scabbard of Her Throat
I didn’t come to hear you parse your words like gnat hairs for a spell. I came to say that you are nothing but an old woman: gnarled bones and parchment skin do not make you a witch. No special powers come with warts. Your stoop—no sign of other-worldly wisdom: time’s constant breath bends us the way that coastal trees are shaped against their will. How many were there, tricked into belief that tender lives could grow from sterile seeds and thrive in soil worked by sorrow’s hands? Like Eve, we were beguiled to know beyond the bastion of our naive garden’s wall. So high the ladders we built, only to fall. Erasure
Scrape the sun from the wall of the sky.
-- Lynn Emanuel, “An Old Woman’s Painting” Scrape the sun from the wall of the sky stipple the woods with a gunmetal dusk. Once, yellow gobs of trees with dun-hued trunks laid thick against a flaxen background evoked daybreak embracing the land. Now, the knife and its erasures. A weathered rag to blot the day from your canvas. |
My Inheritance
When a Chiga beekeeper dies in Uganda
his eldest son receives a small model beehive as a sign that he has inherited his father’s power over the bees. The crude vessels that represent my inheritance are cardboard boxes stacked like hive cells in my parents’ attic, basement and garage. Even they don’t know what many of the boxes hold, some dating back to before the move from our cramped duplex to the house I left after college. Sometimes an artifact escapes “the archive” and makes its way to me—stowed away in a care package or birthday gift— wrapped casually in decades-old newspaper. One year it was an Indian-head penny the size of a pie pan. Recently, a clear vinyl umbrella I used when I was eight. Remembrances trapped within their own uselessness. But what my sisters and I fear most is the inevitable ceremony to come: the months we will spend opening box upon box, three Pandoras releasing swarms of tchotchke spirits back into the world. How can we refuse their wish to leave us what they value, even if what they value is simply the validation ownership bestows? How can we beg them to sell the house, pay off their debts and live well while they can? Portrait of My Father Looking for Four-Leaf Clovers
Abroad for the first time, far from the siren call
of his workroom, my father idles in a close-cropped field within the ragged towered walls of Pevensey Castle. His calloused fingertips graze clovers instead of clutching sandpaper or guiding a table saw to rip the length of a board. I haven’t done this since I was a kid, he says, and I can only believe it—having grown used to the sight of him always weeding and watering, hammering and sanding, tasked with a vast array of things waiting to be transformed by his hands. No, my father was not a father used to the horizonless ocean of free time he now faced in this country-- foreign to him in more ways than one-- to which I have brought him and my mother. In four months this man who leans into the field with the weight of his years will have his first heart attack. This moment a prelude to the leisure and lassitude he would soon be forced to endure in the name of recuperation. What I’m saying is: for 55 years my father looked at clovers as something to be eradicated from the lawn, a blight, a pox, a nuisance. What I’m saying is: my father never found a four-leaf clover in that field. But that wasn’t the reason he sat there and looked for awhile.
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