Alice Friman USA
Troubled Interiors
fin-shaken by whim
or tide, what a confusion—
subject as they are to the wee
switch in the brain that makes
permanently opened eyes see
or not. But how enviable the dreams.
Lidless projections on big wet screens,
unlike our own troubled interiors.
My mother too, in the high hours
of her dying, could not close her eyes.
The once-bright hazel, transfixed
under a yellowish glaze. The lower lids
drooping inside out like buntings
of raw meat. Animal under the ice,
frozen in sight of the hole. I could not look.
Fish stare, stare of the all-knowing,
stare of retribution—or was that imagined—
as I laid a cool wet cloth over her eyes.
For her comfort, I said. Then holding her hand
and singing the songs she’d always sung to me,
I sang her, blindfolded, out of this world.
A good daughter? Let me tell you.
The eye of ice flings enough light to read by.
Even now, six years later, lying here in the dark,
I can still make out the words. Liar. Fraud.
© Copyright, 2014,
Alice Friman. |