Joanna
Boulter
| Avebury These are the creatures that cropped the chalk downs close, great beasts ponderous as mammoth, mastodon, megatherium. They sun their stony skins, they are dun-coloured, warted with ochre, with eau-de-nil, chartreuse, olive, silver-grey. Some crouch and some recline, grazing the grass of Wiltshire. Their stippled hides invite the touch, as one might slap the flank of some huge placid horse, with a click of the tongue, a whistle between the teeth — git over then — And suppose it did, heaving its great stone hoof out of the chalk with a slow suck, a sudden smacking release. I’ve touched and greeted them all, but they are still standing stonestill. They hear slowly, move imperceptibly, never notice the extra pelt as lichen rides them. Many thousands of years along drove roads herded them here to where they’ve bedded in, and a scattering would take as long again even if they could find their way back home. Now there are streets and houses built on the ground of their birthplaces. If their slow stone souls wake to nostalgia, and long to retrace their ancient journeys, they will crush us. I should never have touched them. Dyeing The Corpse’s Hair There is no smell of death in the funeral parlor when my daughter arrives to help prepare her mother-in-law for the casket. Nothing is shocking here. She looks almost herself yet completely other. It had been sudden, that unnoticed wasting, it had shrivelled her. Her arms lie lax, lacking the bones she’d willed for marrow-harvest, though her swollen heart’s unusable any more. Her neglected hair has taken the embalming fluid up unevenly in bright pink patches, a flower set in a vase of ink. How she would hate to arrive in heaven looking worse than she would look going to Mass, to the store, and so my daughter dyes her hair for her there in the funeral parlor basement. Light Ash, the color she always used. Tinted water runs off through the channels to the bucket beneath the table, as other fluids. Her skin is cold, but dry, not clammy, and pressure dents it like raw pastry, earrings must be placed right first time. My daughter paints her nails for her, makes up her face under the mortician’s instructions because no one but family must do this. There’s a special foundation to go on first, beneath the Rimmel, and this too must be right first time. My daughter’s good at makeup. Lastly they dress her in the new dress three sizes smaller, chosen for her by her granddaughters when the youngest asked Is she dead for ever? My daughter calls me to tell me everything, we’re crying across the Atlantic down the phone, and in spite of myself I’m noting everything down. >>>Peter
Ciccariello
Back to Contents |
|||
| |
|