Marie Kane
WAKEFULLNESS
To shake off the nightmare, she should rise
out of bed and perform house patrol:
inspect the loose lock on the kitchen door,
erase long ago phone messages,
stroke the cats' silky fur, answer week-old
emails, or better yet, write a poem,
and then find sleep, having accomplished
something.
But she cannot roll over, sit up, nor stand
unaided—only lie pillow-propped:
elbows, neck, knees cosseted, while a soft
brace clenches her left foot,
and a slanted wedge suspends it like some
chorus girl mid-kick. Shadows
of her disability implements—walker, quad
cane, wheelchair—spear the room's
corners.
Reading, white noise, podcasts, fail to bring
sleep. Desperate right thumb clicks
the TV remote through listings of criminal -
mayhem, weight-loss gimmicks, home
repair. She yearns to latch onto anything
that will halt this nightmare-ridden
sleep, douse this fireball of wakefulness,
and deliver that ripe, elusive letting go.
* * *
THIS OLD HOUSE*
We scraped, swore, wore our fingers raw
with the resistance of the house's dry wood
to coats of primer and paint. Every two years,
I would steady the metal ladder while you
climbed to the top dormers to paint
and paint again. Like our marriage,
the clapboards shouldered peeling paint—
until white flakes splintered and fell
to the yard mixing with the gravel driveway,
sidewalk, and open grass. We had survived
asbestos removal, ugly carpet we couldn't
afford to change, the rusting mailbox,
annoying neighbors, raucous and rainy
July Fourth parties and their muddy
aftermath, screen door that caught
your heel as it closed if you weren't
quick enough to step in, and an unsightly
wallpapered bathroom used by five.
Two babies birthed there, resonance
of voices, echoes of sweetness, implications
of hopelessness.
What would have happened had we stayed?
Marie Kane's poetry has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, included in ten anthologies,
and has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Meadowland Review, U. S. 1 Worksheets, I-70 Review,
Adanna Literary Journal, and others. She is a founding board member and student judge for the Main Street
Voices Poetry Contest. Her chapbook, Survivors in the Garden, (Big Table Publishing, 2012) centers
on her life with multiple sclerosis. She is the 2006 Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate and the poetry editor for
Pentimento magazine. She and her husband, Stephen Millner, an artist, live in Yardley, PA
with their two rescue cats. See more at www.mariekanepoetry.com.
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