Marie KaneMARKING THE SKYListen to the audio version.Forgive your body its flaws, inabilities.Place the future in a knot of the largest oak where stillness reigns. The day will pass not as light but as paths of shout-yellow tulips and royal lilacs wielding their froth. Sit under the Japanese maple, absorb spring-warm sun and bird song that beats the air with chip-chips, trills, whistles. All is sharpened by morning rain, spiked air, arriving summer. Dream all in 'till loud rush of wing halts nestlings' clamor. How simple yet astounding to feed one's brood into quietness. The same with your own whom you fed in this chair under this tree on a day much like this one. Observe the sundial mark light's last, red flare.
* * * BE TOUGH, HE SAYSListen to the audio version.If the world sings welcome! to whole bodies,and expects the slow, the old, the disabled to cling to doorways envying birds, how do you venture out to dinner? But you do when you're reminded of your husband's words—Be tough; the world doesn't expect it from you. At the restaurant, your scooter skillfully navigates around handbags and shoes, chair legs and banquettes. Then you wait until the waiter brings a chair with arms, and if there's no chair with arms, you sit, your body wavering like a round-bottomed Russian doll— your husband supporting you. Dinner is a flurry of chest-protector napkins to counter your unsteady fork. He cuts your salmon, asparagus, and later, laughing, feeds you cake with his fingers as he did years ago at your wedding. It's raining when you leave the restaurant. On the street, car lights paint wet, white stripes. Your husband runs interference on the sidewalk— a polite, sharp-elbowed blocker— but he can't clear everyone. Ahead of you, people talk to each other, to their cell phones. No one says, Oh, I'm sorry, when they stop on a dime—that absent- minded standstill as if they forgot something important. You must halt the scooter with a jerk to not run into them—they still don't notice you. You fantasize driving through rain-filled puddles with hidden depths, turning the speed to max (four miles an hour!) and splashing dirty puddle-water on the shoes and legs blocking you, wheel-catch be damned. Your car comes into view. Scooter angles toward the car's open passenger door; your husband helps you stand, turn, and sit, while he lifts your legs into the car. Seatbelt click, head back, you're thankful that you stayed upright, that you both could relish a meal that he didn't have to cook. On the way home, you study the untroubled moon above the nightfall, its meteoroid impacts, volcanic action long gone, the Sea of Crises and the Ocean of Storms, reminders.
* * * THANKSGIVING, 2018Listen to the audio version.for Sandy You had parked your car a mile away, then, head down,
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