Core creative / Poetry
Lot’s Wife
A poem
for Pansy Maurer-Alvarez 1 Cleopatras—my calla lilies evoke cobras, milk-bathed skin, aboriginal queens. I planted them in a blue ceramic pot outside my bedroom window. I planted them in darkness, late august—a last defense against the shrinking of summer. I planted them to cup, hold, preserve the sun’s warmth a little while longer. Yellow coiling spathes— flower-sculptures caught in motion: opening, unwinding. The lilies guard my sleeping like terracotta warriors. All night the wall between us dissolves and they enter my dreams— silk-cloaked angels lifting and carrying me into the hills. 2 Every day is the same— the radio talking to the kitchen walls and she tending to her herbs. She's called them after operas— Tosca, La Traviata, Aida, and Carmen— lined them up on her windowsill. This is her home, her life for as long as she can remember. Last week she pulled a shallot from her garden— the sole survivor of forty bulbs planted in the spring. Held it by its tail like a mouse, mud dripping from its yellowing head, sat it on a square napkin, the outer skin peeling back. She rolled its name and variations round and round in her mouth like an incantation. There's a tree stump in the living-room, it resembles a head— they use it as a coffee table. Sometimes she examines the pale green circles of lichen for signs—patterns, love letters. Sometimes they become the joined up shapes of her favourite constellations— the Water Snake, Bird-of-Paradise, the Hunting Dog. This day is different— even the birds know and are silent. An empty wine glass on the shelf; her head, a cloud of sleeplessness like the dark cloud of tree that hangs in her neighbour's garden. The neighbour they'll be leaving behind like all the other neighbours on the street— men and women she's fed at her table; the children who grew up with her own. A sheepskin rug is slung over the back of a chair; an untuned piano props up a photo of her dead mother holding her two daughters, while they were still small enough to hold. Today she's leaving all of this behind. Her husband is on a righteous mission— he's taking her somewhere new, he's taking her somewhere beyond the hills. He thinks she has no regrets. He thinks she has no one to look back for. 3 Worried she was cold I draped her favourite cloak around her breathing in the last gasps of her perfume— the sticky scent of Bergamot orange, lemon, heart of Jasmine. I’m trying to imagine her face in the featureless pillar of rock salt that stands before me. I imagine she can hear me. Where does the heart go when it stops? What does the mouth close on when the lungs are stilled? She’s standing on a hill caught between sky and sea; her cloak billowing. From a distance it hangs mid-air like the flower of a calla lily or body of a dust devil— red and swirling.