.................................
A Visit to the Sick
.................................

After her third stroke,
he searches in her room,
not stealthily,
but like an SS officer
whose authority
is his awful insignia.
She really doesn't have
anything he wants,
but he has to take away something
to justify the break in.
Where are the stock certificates?
I don't know. They are hers--
I haven't looked for them.
There was a safe-deposit box.
no more--not for years.
He finds the stocks in a metal box
in the bottom of a drawer
under her underwear,
under the gaudy mother-of-pearl crucifix,
under the blue glass beaded rosary,
under the ugly doilies ineptly crocheted by her mother,
under the soiled bamboo chopsticks--
a memento of her trip to Chinatown in 1922.
They aren't worth much,
but he says he'll take them
back for safekeeping--you know;
they shouldn't be dumped
in the bottom drawer of her maple dresser.
He tells her he'll divide them
as they should be divided--
between the grandchildren
(my one child, his six).
She nods at everything
and comprehends nothing.
She just wants his sharp voice to stop.
He strips her photo album
of all the old family pictures--
tintypes of my great grandparents,
my grandmother when she was a baby,
Colonel Shewalter uniformed as a warrant officer
in the Civil War.
That's all he takes
(he already has her antique banjo clock).
He is angry that there isn't more.

She isn't dead,
She isn't dead,
I keep saying.

I don't like his boots
or the noise they make on the stairs,
but I'm glad to hear him descending,
the slamming door,
and I wait--breathless--
till the key turns in his ignition,
the motor cranks, and the car backs away.
The sound finally fades.

She can't hear,
but she watches me listening;
she is perched alert as a blackbird,
and I can see my tensed body
mirrored in her white knuckles
gripping the rails of her wheelchair.

.................................
Therese Leigh
.................................

 
Copyright © Therese Leigh
June 1996

... an excerpt in this room by Jan McLaughlin...
i lie in an autumn pile of your kisses
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