Published in The Georgia Review, Summer 2014
Black
Work
She
stood at the window and watched me.
How
long she had waited for me to wake up
I
dared not ask, nor could she have answered,
her
jaws woven shut by the undertaker’s twine,
a
trade she knew well, having taught herself
black
work by night in the attic,
bodies
laid down like her quilts lifted
out
of the chest come the first killing frost,
dry
ice tucked under their torsos to keep their corruption
from
drifting downstairs to the breakfast nook
where
she'd have set out a plate for my father,
her
only child, knowing he rose early.
Last
summer I found the quilts,
gnawed
to batting by rats.
I
sat awhile at her Singer that stitched
gowns
and frocks during Hoover days,
the
treadle still singing its rusty toil under
the
soles of my feet as I pedaled it briefly.
Side-stepping
chamberpots, I turned
the
key left behind in her book case
where
I might have rummaged through Latin
and
palmistry volumes, ignored those
that
detailed with stark illustration the inexorable
death
of the tissues that swaddle
our
bones, the journey of blood
that
keeps trying to push its way down to the toes
before
giving up. To
give
up
the ghost
as
the Bible describes the last breath--
how
those words used to frighten me,
sleepless
for fear I could hear her still
stitching
and snipping, the body upon
which
she lavished her skill not protesting
one
last knot to pull its smile tighter,
so
the bereaved might exclaim, as in life
they
had never, “So pretty!
Look
at her smiling for Jesus.”
