SHE CALLED IT
the piazza. I'd been to the library and it isn't a piazza at all, but she says
it just the same.
I didn't say that, but it's not like I
know what to call it anyway. I wouldn't say it to her face if I did know
because she is so fierce. The doctors, like bad farmers, pulled babies and other
things you’d think were vital out of her and all sorts of bits off of her as
the calendars repeated themselves, and father says when they bury her there
will be an echo inside. She carries on like the turning of the earth, and
everyone loves her and fears her no matter how much of her is left.
She never went leathery; she got
adamantine. She was a basilisk to a stranger and a pitted madonna to her own.
We make a pilgrimage, no less, to visit her. Which one are you again is
the name she uses to prove she loves us all the same amount. She presses a
quarter in my hand like a card trick when we leave.
The piazza is just a rotten porch that
leans drunkenly off the building and she sends me to get the food that cooled
out there. It’s thirty rickety feet above the jetsam of a thousand lives gone
bad, surrounded by chainlink and crime. She’s like a one-woman congress,
overruling all sorts of laws of man and nature, but you can’t help feeling she
can’t keep a lookout for gravity forever on your behalf, can she? Everything is
only a matter of time in this world.
It’s always hot and close when you return,
breathless from fear and hurry and the whip of the wind, and you notice she has
only two colors: grey and the pink of her cheek. There are always things I
don't understand, boiling. Everything on the plates is grey and pink, too.
The rooms are in a parade. The triptych of
the parlor windows shows the sack of a forgotten Rome through the tattered
lace. No running in the hall! Her daughter lives down stairs so there was no
one to bother but… the very idea!
But how could any child linger in that
tunnel of a hall? You had to get past it to the kitchen table. The bedrooms
branched off, dim caves that smelled of perfume bought in stores forty years closed
by men thirty years dead. The indistinct whorls on the wallpaper reached out to
touch your hand like a leper.
At the table, the lyre-back chair groans
and shifts under even my little weight, and you sit transfixed while she spoons
the sugar and dumps the milk into the tea until the saucer is a puddle, and you
wondered in your head how many times the bag could take it. There’s cinnamon
and laughter now and then and blessed sunlight that turned the battered
battleship linoleum into a limpid pool. The cork shines through the scrim of
the coating, a million footfalls revealing more and more of it over time.
And Catherine? The Cork shows through
there, too.
5 comments:
Two of my favorites.
I don't understand it, but there's deep emotions lying underneath the words that grab me as I go by.
I concur with Leslie; this is one of my favorites, and not only because I have an affinity for Corks.
Sweet mercy, but that is sweet writing. I thank you for it.
I told you you were a Modernist writer, but now I think I was only right because you see the Irish past and perfect. Tense is the timbre between the words; you have outdone Mr. van Morrison, you know.
Blessings.
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