Page 44 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

Mary Gilliland
37
Pat Euphoria
(Three Excerpts)
After the Scottish National Gallery exhibit of Lee Miller's opus.
How does a soul find its way from the twenty-first century, a gold- plated odeum with one in ten scenarios to play, an October palace of leisure with malice, more people in pieces than ever? It’s too late to
slash my wrists but I know why one would want to.
My feet have a tide, they go
numb and recede. How straightforward the past, a land of carriages
and working farms, as though murder skulked then only in high places.
Toes, oh the toes—can’t touch broken pebbles on the shoulder of the road, imbibe the garden soil, the city
sense of tarmac. I lean
where the windshield
glass lodges. Hardheaded gal I try to step back in.
~
Three miles’ stroll parallel the trolley —mother’s mother’s constitutional until the age of ninety-three. Mother’s suburban daily: two.
‘Sister, what’s this tendency
to torpor, stasis in a chair
with a book that wrecks the eyes.
Must be your father’s branch, the guys.’
A superb day out she’d want me for: bargains at the factory shop, tea rooms, a free shuttle from one end of the mall.
What I wanted: native trees -
otters denned in riverbank - ospreys free to breed, brood, hatch -