Heir Apparent

Issue #48 October 2019

Narrative Poem | Liz Countryman

I felt the authority of the arrangement:

how flowers with light behind them, hanging plants

near the phone in our house

framed that phone, the window,

our family dog chained in the shade of pines

and soft needles beyond the glass.

The phone like a faucet.

A little grime in its grooves.

In the morning, I felt a duty to keep–track of, grip

that house’s side, that side’s window

that led the nose toward brightness like a chain.

Not the story of how it was placed here, but all of it facing me at once,

a condition of my existence,

like someone gesturing and saying, “Here.”

*

Upstairs, my mother’s dresser like gates one swam through,

a ceramic awareness of several sisters

next to her, all of them including her, an awareness

that combed each day’s uncertainty like a reef combs water.

The past stands still, upright, cheerful and the present

tries to ram through.

My past face’s unresponsive confidence faces

my present face in the mirror, is unhelpful.

I was caught that day in the hallway

by the headmistress with a mouth of saltines;

every morning that week, I perceived a difference

between my feet on the orange brown carpet

and yesterday’s hand on the brass handle of the pinkish door,

hallways becoming old thanks

to me, eroding them with my movement;

and keeping yesterday’s grime, making me odd—

rubbed a wet finger on a desk covered in pen and whiteout.

*

Part of me is stationary and part of me passes through.

The stupid hair and the remembered hand.

A comb more memorable than the hair.

A bush, more memorable than air.

*

Now, to be 40 is to be a comb someone else’s hair moves through.

I sense but can’t describe some other, newer kind of openness

contorting me—

Now when I set the cereal boxes on the counter

when I make a shape out of them

what prior arrangement—what impulse disguised as practicality—

do I refute? And what of it

do I refute, and what of it do I carry forward?

What of that stubborn shape around me back then

do I now replicate, even as I refute it?

Or has one simply grown up from beneath the other

but stayed one thing

like the skin of a hand?

*

I have this statuette my mother must have given me

maybe on my First Communion—

a little girl in a pink nightgown

is pressed against an enormous hand,

snuggles in the cupped palm of this hand,

seemingly a man’s, white, older (it is veined)—

the girl’s face is old fashioned in its serenity. She has red lips.

The statuette suggested I was known

in ways both unknown to me

and known—hesitating,

how I was not like this girl,

the bare black trees outside my bedroom with the wind moving through—

a different kind of hand.

*

Wherever there is arrangement there is seeing, there is choice, there is opinion.

I sat on the tar roof facing a June sunset

my fingers in the tar

in the dry rivers of the tar.

I thought about roads: an idea that was also real.

*

In my house, in this arrangement,

something about the twentieth century.

Not as a capped off thing, but forward movement

as I then knew it—a narrative.

Yesterday I ripped out the weeds in our vegetable bed

and I thought about the twentieth century.

I felt for the roots, slight but matted, and tore them up like carpet,

I felt them and they were cool

and they ripped more, the more I moved.

*

I think: I’ll write about that yellow plastic grocery cart,

travel into memory

but then?

What do I do in memory?

I am an example.

I am the piggy who made his house out of sticks,

which will be taken off one by one by wind.

I remember when I felt pushed around by sex, a speck

bullied by my want for things—

roads and interactions

glances that weren’t returned

a brick building that looked deliciously wet

moss delicious as the past—

and how my impulses secretly carried forward their inverse, an order

I spread into my life like spores.

Now I stiffen my hands, trying to stop something.