Sandra Evans Falconer
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The Priest
(for RB)

The priest is sick – so says
The doctor, writing a prescription
From her office in the old hospital.
The priest takes the lithium, his
Hands shaking, hides the bottle 
In the carved stand next to his bed.
At night, he reads the classics, 
While his thoughts, frail as moths,
Flit across the dry page.
Once he wrote short stories,
Now he writes: buy butter, 
Get food for the dogs. His friends
Call the answering machine:
Where are you? Please call me.
The priest moves from the pantry
To the living room, carrying the fine
Books he once read, before his eyes
Blurred and his voice turned to tin;
Before his illness danced him like
A marionette down the walk 
To get the mail.

The priest has seen the crucifix,
And he knows:
God isn’t in the lithium,
He isn’t with the doctor –
He’s here, moving from room to room,
Down that hall where 
The priest kneels, rocking 
Slowly back and forth.
Eventually, they’ll find 
Each other and sit 
Together in the cool garden,
One talking for hours –
The other listening.
 

Corsage

The gift was from my grandmother.
Every Easter, by my place at breakfast, 
there was a gardenia corsage.
My grandmother would smile at me,
and straighten the cushions 
of her high brocade sofa.
I would pink the corsage 
on the jacket of my pink silk suit, 
and watch myself and my new
beauty in my grandmother’s mirror.
I could see her curtains blowly
faintly in the sun, and the crème
colored vanity where she sat 
earlier that morning surrounded
By her make-up jars, nail polish
and fluted glass bottles.

Once I sat there, and shook
her swan powder puff
all over me, hoping some magic
would fly out, and make me
as beautiful as she. I didn’t 
know then, how she drank
and wandered up the dark 
street in her  nightgown.
 At 14, I knew I would never be
 that beautiful. But every Easter,
 there was always that gardenia
corsage, and my grandmother 
telling me how fragile it was, how 
I shouldn’t touch the smooth 
white petals. Keep it in the icebox,
She’d say and I’d leave it there:
cold, white – beautiful.

(a revised version of the same poem from Imagining the World, l998.) 

The Current

(For Peter)

When Peter was a baby,
grinning for the camera
in that  long white nightgown
Mother always dressed him in,
She’d tell us:
He looks like aunt Ruth,
My great aunt who used  to hide
liquor bottles in her suitcase.
One day of her unhappy life.
she walked out into the sea
and drowned.

I was 8 then, the eldest,
believing every story I heard, 
convinced that my great aunt
could somehow travel  forward
and infect the life of my new brother
who had her eyes.
When I heard him cooing 
over his mashed potatoes,
I knew I had to put myself
between that current
and the water reaching him.

For years afterwards, 
at Christmas, or on his birthday;
I wrote him funny stories:
his father waltzing over the stone terrace,
his brother & sister doing the tango
across the wide front lawn, and 
his mother tap dancing  
in front of the dishwasher;
where the worst that ever happened
was somebody trying the rumba
at the end of the dock
where the waves splashed only
slightly beneath the wooden boards. 

(Published in an earlier form in Imagining The World, 1998)

Wonder Woman

Wednesday night and I’m making
strawberry Jell-O
to have tomorrow

when I come home from the hospital
after the surgery.

What are you doing? Lucy asks
when she calls earlier.

Making Jell-O, I say, bringing 
the phone into the kitchen,

where I stand
with the surprisingly solid

small box, 
a giant strawberry on the front.

I mix the red powder with water,
pour it into the glass dishes on the counter.

I try to tell Lucy how I feel:

Whenever I make this,
I feel like the heroine
of my own story:

Plucky Girl, Warrior Queen,
the one you always put your hopes on.

I love it, Lucy says:
how’s the Jell-O?

A little less shaky, I tell her.


(from The Six o’clock Siren, 2009) 

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