1 minute read
Antiphony With Rising Wings
Kim Welliver
Why this loss? One might as well ask “when” of the windfallen peach, or of the sky weaving its last dusk on a purple loom. Each day ends. Evening comes when it comes, veiled as a nun. Pipistrelles fill the trees. Is the bat any less lovely than the dove? It keeps the night with its high-pitched song. Feathered or furred, it makes no difference. We watch lives pass like a book, half-remembered. Beloved faces blurred as foxed pages.
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A chill company of doubt surrounds us, dismantling our family. Our saint’s supplications and rosary beads seem just as probable as the bone, the twigs, the twist of hair in a juju bag. Everything is fruitless as we bend under static lights, genuflect
Kim Welliver
before IV pumps and arterial lines. We fracture like glass. Parent becomes child. Hospital rooms are blued as morgue drawers. As with the crepitation of crickets or wet lungs, our ears recognize an ending. A sort of panic spurs us forward.
Groping. A shard of lost days refracts, giving glimpses, both, of Mother’s knee and the family crypt, where something rank seeps beneath carnation-scent. And I am caught here, bleary-eyed in the sour half-light between grief and memory, between pill bottle clutter and the 3 am pacing that creaks floorboards like bad knees. I listen to the tethered breath, wait out the faltering heartbeat’s dimmed throb. Hours of time pleat, compress into minutes. My vigilance is the vulture’s outspread wing. But still, I can find my mother, in the corner just beyond sleep’s diminished margin: the deft hands and lovely throat of the woman she once was: sleek in a spangled cocktail dress, (an emerald swath of silk,) aquanetted up-do, her dark apprehending eye in its frosted glamor.
She is there, smoothing her curls. So clear, before dust settled its web across her face, diminutive as her young daughter’s dream. As easy to recall her lipstick and heels before they were replaced with piecrust and knucklebone soup, in some othertime, before. Bedside, I take her slack hand, stroke the purpled maplines, the arthritic humps. Around the room’s antiseptic edges monitors chirp and blip. Shadows slide closer, fill with a collection of regrets. The sky deepens. Something flickers in the dusklight of her hospital window. Bat or dove? All I recognize are wings.
