Her Grief, and: Mother Sits in Front of Her Friend's Painting of the Sea of Galilee Paul Dickey (bio) Her Grief The moment happens, you know.A butter knife dropped to the floor.Time that once moved got slow.Everyone stared at the door. We thought maybe it would notif only we'd saidthe right thing, held that thought.No one could have read her mind. We stayed awayas long as our travels could.Adults don't know what to say.It was a child who would. Grandma, did the cuckoo stop?I looked at my sister,her face a wrinkled mop.My wife looked at my brother. Mother never looked back,turned to Dad who wasn't there,we dead in our track,and proceeded to tell him where the neighbor's rosebush laysome thirty-seven years ago, [End Page 53] beside the berries and the compost hay.Jack, where did all those good people go? Oh, but you never listen to me.Mom recited a lineage of dogsscaring her new blue-eyed baby.It was as if she'd kept logs of cats prowling the neighborhoodfor fifty—maybe seventy—yearsfar back into Dad's boyhood,kids ringing doorbells and her young "dears" selling candy for a band trip.But it was later that evening,insisting she never once broke her hip,that Mother's words lost their meaning. Mother Sits in Front of Her Friend's Painting of the Sea of Galilee Note the precise Dali-like detail of her, unlike the painting—how the baby fat of her arm rests on the flabby,cushioned faux-velvet chair, alligator-scaled tributariesof the Jordon River running through her hands.She balances herself as a White-faced Whistling Duckand yet she prepares for battle like an Egyptian Goose.When she speaks, she swallows spittle and her voice soundslike a White-winged Tern flying in low for the dinner at duskthat I have brought her from Kentucky Fried Chicken,until we no longer can live in the current centurybut in a past when men were clothed in simple linen,fished for extinct Tilapia, and walked in dust with God. [End Page 54] She is such a fisher of men, mostly though now only for me,who cannot believe in even one miracle, though I come herereligiously every evening to visit her, living and dyingby this sea. She expects to sleep again in the Holy Landany night now, though she has not traveled there for years. [End Page 55] Paul Dickey Paul Dickey won an award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Dickey's first full-length poetry manuscript, They Say This Is How Death Came into the World, was published by Mayapple Press in January 2011. His poetry and flash have appeared in Verse Daily, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Pleaides, 32Poems, Bellevue Literary Review, and Cider Press Review, among other online and print publications. A second book, Wires Over the Homeplace, was published by Pinyon Publishing in October 2013. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press
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