The
river passes so quietly
you’d
fall into it if you were blind or daydreaming
its
path so deeply scored,
so
unimpeded by rock or shoal
it
fails to sing
or
splash but only proceeds
in
the one clear direction, south I guess,
though
it may at times diverge
as
the bending valleys pull it onward
through
canyons and underneath bridges
where
a bright bush adorns a gravelly edge
people
once sat on, thinking about something
as
I do in my mother’s guest room’s
1940’s
honeymoon bedroom suite, thick maple
bedframe,
dressing table with photos propped
on
a beige linen runner.
Old
brushes and combs.
A
mirror with a long handle.
*
My
mother and I watch TV,
eat
our small supper.
“You’re
so smart, dear,” she says,
“you
should be on Jeopardy.”
The
winning contestant loses all her prize money
with
a wrong answer but clearly
has
learned the protocol:
No
crying or whining!
No
gloating either, when it’s the other guy
standing
there with nothing all of a sudden.
The
new categories are revealed with a flourish.
We
top up our glasses with Mom’s home-made Cabernet Sauvignon.
The
three contestants look calm behind their pulpits.
*
Tonight’s
chamber concert is titled Waning Crescent
for
the type of moon it is this night. Among
other pieces
Mozart’s
“The Hunt” from the Haydn Quartets
will
be performed at the Lutheran Church with
its
austere altar & fine acoustics. The
oboist is from Portugal.
It
was beautiful but
driving
around in the pitch dark afterwards
feeling
old and diminished in capacities,
powerless
and lonely in my mother’s car
trying
to read the street signs, pretending
to
know where I’m going, the guy behind me
pushing
with high-beams on
near
where big dim houses twinkle on a far hillside
way
beyond my ken, I don’t know this place very well
anymore
and I got turned around exiting the Lutheran Church
parking
lot where the outside lights weren’t working and
a
fellow with a flashlight was motioning this way, this way
*
It’s
nearing the end of hunting season.
Pickups
have been through the car-wash & sedans
contain
more customers going to Seniors Day at the pharmacy
than
camouflage-clad gun customers
surveying
the parking lot in their rear-view mirror
Inside
the pharmacy, swift and busy dispensing of tablets and instructions
I’m
holding a form & when my name is called, I rise with alacrity,
I
can hear alright, I can get out of here,
just
an errand for my mother, not me, not yet
*
The
concert-master announced that Mozart’s “The Hunt”
wasn’t
really about a hunt. It was just a name
it
ended
up with because of the prominence of horns.
I’m
not alone though I’m alone here.
I
worry about my mother, who’s 90 and having trouble.
A tree seems to agree with me
when
I think one of us should move up here
for
a while. I think of all those I know
with faraway mothers,
one
in South Africa, several in England.
Prince George
isn’t
that far but by now, my carry-on
is
bulging and heavy, zipped up, the handle extended.
*
A
huntress kneels in the night sky
drawing
an arrow from her quiver. A bear is
standing up
at
the Arrivals entrance at the airport, looking like a man
in
a bear suit, which is what a bear is
in
the occlusion of the waning crescent—
truth
so modestly, so hilariously hidden
and
present in the painted fur and long claws
of
our disguises. The shuttle arrives at
4:40 a.m.,
stars
still out, the other passengers
mute
shapes looking out the window
at
nothing, the odd building with lights on,
or
just darkness going by, already gone.
Sharon Thesen is a B.C.-based poet, editor, and critic. Recently, she has published work in Arc/Cordite
Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2014, Dispatches from the
Poetry Wars (online), and Brick Magazine. Her 8 books/chapbooks include Oyama Pink Shale,
The Good Bacteria, and A Pair of Scissors. She is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan Campus, where she taught poetry and creative nonfiction and
co-edited, with Nancy Holmes, Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. She has edited two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, two editions of Charles Olson’s correspondence with book designer Frances Boldereff, and a GG-award-winning selected poems of
Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree.
tbe Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
