The Waiting Room Her eyes are fixed on the oversized, galvanized wall clock, its steady hand on a round dial, mechanically measuring hours and minutes, always moving, never stopping. She struggles to suppress her anxiety. Her husband has been in the operating theater for many revolutions of the hand. Then the clock strikes midnight, doors swing open, the operation successful. She will have her loved one back. With a full swing of her walking stick she shatters the glass of the timepiece. Relief courses through every waiting vein. Stop the hand! Make time to stand still so that the joy of their reunion may seem timeless. *** Graceful Light Where do we find you, graceful light? With Goethe on his deathbed asking for “more light”? In the pink line of dawn? Or the purple stream of a sunset? In the flickering golden gleam of a child’s waking eyes? Or the pallid blur of an old person losing sight? The night is never dark and the light is never far, as when an illuminated glint of the sun breaks through the gray clouds with its blessings. *** An Old Woman’s Body Staring at my reflection in a mirror my heart rate ticks up. The corners of my mouth droop. I wasn’t promised that my lean figure would last life’s entire journey, but why are my once firm breasts now sagging? Why the extra cushions around belly and butt as if my cells had been inflated? Even my arms have flaps. My skin molts but fails to renew itself. And what happened in my beloved garden when my knees buckled and I couldn’t get up? I sigh at so much dilapidation. As I sit down, still looking at my mirror image, my eyes brighten and the sides of my mouth curve slightly upward at the sight of a toddler jumping onto my lap and snuggling into its warm, soft contours, loving my body just as it is right now. *** Earth Beneath My Feet Succulent mud squishing between my toes, stirring dormant seeds in fertile ground where plants can take hold. Green shoots become flowers that bloom in abundance in due season, unmindful of their beginnings. Earth is to vegetation as parents are to their offspring, preparing rich plots on which the young can blossom into adulthood, unaware of the roots in the nourishing soil of their forebears. *** The Rainbow Tree Am I the tree with deep roots and thick bark? A burrow for a fox at my base, a hole in a sturdy limb for an owl? Each winter ice storms break some branches, but in autumn golden leaves hold sway. Once I was a sapling curiously poking through snow cover, stretching my greening arms toward the sun. In spring birds flocked to the nectar of my white blossoms and in summer hands reached for the juicy purple plums. I was perky and secure in my harvest. What spans the life cycle of a budding and aging tree? It’s a rainbow bridging beginning and end. If I balance from one pole to the other over curves and along bends, I can savor the colors of each stage.
—Submitted on 09/24/2022
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Ute Carson is the author of Listen (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2021). Recent work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Canadian Horse Journal, Motherwell Magazine, and other journals. She lives in Austin with her husband.
Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
