Organic mixed media artwork by Kay Sexton
Feet of Women I Know
It is not every day that you write a poem
about how giving a pedicure to your mother
becomes a historical expedition—
like Kurtz, you snake along welts, pelts, whorls
shins, shanks, knees into a heart, not dark, which was
your heart too. Because things change in being
the same, you begin seeing patterns.
Your wife's feet are filigreed by similar griefs, their weight
bearing on her. She had seen her
mother claimed by COVID, wrapped in a brown blanket
and something resembling darkness which comes
when all hope becomes receding sunset. When you touched her
cold, pale feet peeping from hospital blanket
you thought of her young, newly-widowed feisty avatar
keeping two jobs, writing books, making art, ultimately rescuing
three dogs, one of which sits in your lap, only to end up here amidst
the pristine tomb of an ICU. Perhaps, this inevitability
of grief weighs on your wife's feet, which perpetually ache,
which you massage most nights. But you know, expecting
massages to assuage grief, or pedicures to erase years of neglect
is like flying kites to scrape rain off the roof
of the sky—something your sister once told you while
describing her fear of losing parents—a fear she articulated
as a poem you edited and made sharper, though the jagged edges of
loss tucked in its lines caused fine cuts on your heart which
were pulled open when you saw your mother's brand-new knees from surgery
bandaged in a kilometre of gauze. After the gauze comes
off, after the walker is chugged away,
after the Physio stops visiting,
giving her a pedicure won't be a historical expedition. Perhaps.
