Page 42 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #6

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carolyn sMart
In St. Nicholas’s Dirt
Shouting monkey puzzle tree each time we passed the church, not that’s where God lives, that’s where Nanny’s buried in an unmarked grave, maybe ashes long since gone, but that dirt is where I see them both, the rotten roots of the long gone tree, the bones of a tiny woman who fell dead half inside her winter coat one night at Christmas time. God does not live there, nor does he sit at a groaning table wearing white while Nanny sips a sherry with her pinkie finger raised. I raise my gestured finger, both hands, to that now.
The monkey puzzle tree does not abide pollution. On the Sevenoaks high street where Nanny lived for the weeks before her death they sucked in soot: the tree, the tiny woman, God, who did not live beside them. To find your death inside a coat sleeve is a puzzle. They cut down the dying tree and left St. Nicholas unshaded by the cones.
Sherry is a fortified wine. Nanny took a trip on a boat with her friend Miss Eves. In the evenings before supper she slipped her arm into her best white blouse, her body hidden inside. St. Nicholas hid coins in the shoes of the needy. She allowed her-
self one small sherry before a meal. Miss Eves name was Florence. Nanny’s name was Grace. I do not think she felt that, believed in God, knew where he was hiding, though she told me once my mother was an angel, but that was all a lie.
My mother was a Christian Scientist. Death was not a subject for discussion, so that Nanny’s disappearance from our lives was just as much a mystery as how to climb the monkey puzzle tree that grew in St. Nicholas’s dirt.
Smart has written six collections of poetry including Careen (Brick Books, September 2015), Hooked - Seven Poems (Brick Books, 2009) and The Way to Come Home (Brick Books, 1993). An excerpt from her memoir At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press, 2001) won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, poetry editor for the MacLennan Series of McGill-Queen’s Press, and since 1989 has taught Creative Writing at Queen’s University.