Celia Sees It Round
She says she doesn't want him but I know it's not true --
she'd keep him if she could sew him tight
to one of her embroidered samplers, pillows or shams.
It's his constant leaving that puts the lie
to her faked serenity in that damned chair. Mother says
she wasn't always like this but I don't really remember
much of her walking life, except perhaps, that it was I
who was always struggling to catch her up. I do remember him;
it was the first day he caught our family's eye, running fast
to her side when she fell, helping them carry her back
to the house, her neck lolling on its stem like a broken reed.
Later, one of the men found his drawing of Alice, showed
it to my Father who said, "My you've quite the talent young man."
In the coming weeks, as the doctors around her flat, white bed
shook their heads, muttered "We're sorry." "It was a clean break."
"She's lucky to have the use of her arms," that Father hoping to make
some good of what had happened, made arrangements
with his solicitors for a fund to school the 'poor lad' --
as that's what we called him then. But he's far from a poor lad
now, his hair all glossy black and his eyes a kind of blue
that make me think I could fall into them and float away,
be they sea or sky. He dresses so fine, in a grey morning coat and
tailored damask vest, nipped round a slender waist, not paunchy
like my father and my uncles. But it's my sister he wants --
her he's always trying to impress with his stories and presents.
Tonight he brought special cards and a viewer to spy them through.
He handed one to me and I had to gasp when I saw how life-like
the leopard looked springing towards me out of the trees. He laughed
when I jumped and said "Grrrr!!" and then explained how the two
pictures on the card and the viewer work to make something flat
look full and round, and then he looked to Alice and you know he
was thinking in a poetic kind of way about how flat her life is now,
how he could take her in his round embrace and pull her
into a better orbit. But she wouldn't even look at his pictures, said
her eyes were tired, then turned her chair in a silent, private
circle all her own, and rolled away.
