The Blue Moon Review

Aorta, Keeping the Whitecaps White
by Dennis Finnell

Today I mentally cut down the forest across the road
So we could see the last century.

She dawdled there on the bare, solidified 
Wave of the hillside,
And we spied on her from behind
The tumbled stone wall, upright once more.

She was at the pump working
The black cast-iron lever up and down,
Making the rusty thing squeal
For mercy, and drawing up 
A gurgling, pulsing 
Aorta of water into her own
Wooden scrub bucket, on the side of which
She had used a paring knife to cut
MK, her initials.  

                    If parents give us
Two genetic legs to stand on, a foursome
Of grandparents makes us
Quadrupeds.  And so to hold one's face
In both hands and to orient one's
Nameplate along a worn path to that single
Round white face is as good
As walking to the moon, on one leg.

There's nothing wrong with being a spider,
Having great-grandparents for legs.
It beats too much white space.

I am a spider.  I am 
The millipede of old, a thousand-legger
Undulant as an ocean, able to climb
Upside-down, a herbivore
Who Mary flicks off the yellow squash
Blossom in the kitchen yard.

"Be off with you."  And we are.

Where everybody and his brother came from
Takes a long walk away
From Mary Keenan, up a lichen-splotched stone wall,
On a thousand legs.  

                    Night is coming soon,
Hungry, able to see in the dark, covered
In fur or feathers.  It may eat us, no matter
How much we stand up, begging,
And there's more where we came from, under
The palmate leaves you kick in the park.

It's dark now.  We're going to be
Some omnivore's dinner.  Or the morning lark's.

Mary has carried the evening's
Last yoke of scrub buckets
Across her shoulders, into the master's
Big yellow house.  

                    It was a stark interpretation
She gave, of the goddess
With her scale of justice.
And now it's even more stark, for reason's
Nightmare hands down its judgment:

"You have manufactured this woman
From a few vital statistics 
And some cold, stale hearsay.
She's a zombie.  I'm still one
Hungry nightmare."

                   Mary feels like a lead
Doll in her bed alone, alive, tuckered
Out, with the weight of the earth pressing
Hard against her back.

                       She is barely awake.

Now she is dreaming of no one 
But herself
Down on her knees, scrubbing a floor 
With a scrub brush with a mouth that keeps 
Saying "Our Fathers."

Soon enough the master's floor is the ocean,
And Mary's job is to scrub it 
From dawn to dusk, down on 
Her knees, keeping the whitecaps
White, the ocean that rocked her here.