Tuesday Poem: Notorious Veins

grain-y

thing clapp

-ing its

tin-y

hands see

the small

screen see

it pulses

it claps

its ti

-ny hands

shadows

like nost-

rils go in

out

no, not a

baby, love,

not hands

this is

cardiac

care

this

a beating

heart

*

he says the buzzer whoops like a small siren and then there’s the running and the voices crying out like they do in a rugby match ‘come on, Tony, you can do it’, then something slapping on skin and the distant sound of clapping ‘Tony, come on’

*

he says

when it’s quiet

the nurse comes and sits 

in the chair by his bed

Beth in pink fimo on her

chest, and

she slips off her shoe

and rubs the ball of her

bad foot

*

one night she talks about how the chopper

brought Tony in with his cap still on his head,

and when she took it off he’d blinked so fast

she thought he would never stop

he’d wanted to talk about the two women he loved

and how neither of them knew,

and two sons that disappointed,

and his one wish that he’d taken up flying

I wanted to fly too, my father says

he said to Beth, and he told her about sitting

all the exams but how he was too tall

for the plane so he had to go to Africa

*

another night, he describes the smell of Erinmore Flake

when he opened the tin: all honey and smokey – taking

that first fingerful – packing it into the bowl of his pipe

*

other facts he shares while Beth kneads her foot:

the dark high ceilings of the kafenion off Syndagma Square

where his father played cards, the Greek record my mother

was playing when they first met, the children and grandchildren:

their names, the colour of their hair

lastly, his disappointing veins – the way they refuse

to yield blood no matter who tries

*

(I know none of this for a fact, I’m only guessing)

*

we see Beth with her trolley:  

she walks with us to my father’s

cubicle – you must be Mary

the writer, she says, and this

is your daughter, Isabel

when we reach the bed,

the fimo badge heaves

on the mountainous bosom,

and she takes his arm

with its notorious veins, and slips

in the needle no trouble at all –

I know you, her fingers say,

I know the

grain

-y

se

     crets

of

your

beat-

ing

heart

Mary McCallum

For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar. The hub poem is Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's To Stuart chosen by editor Robert Sullivan.