EDGEWOOD ORCHARD GALLERIES
Mom stood near the hand-blown glass vases and bowls, her hair
not yet completely grey. She watched Dad study a piece he liked.
He said he wanted to buy it. But, because of the trip out West
we were taking later in the summer, we didn’t have the money.
He picked it up, one hand soft around the rim, the other supporting
the base. “I hope it will be here next fall,” he said. He knew
it would not be.
In the gallery there was a reverent silence, a hush broken only
by the creaking of the second-story floorboards, by the screen door
slamming on its tight spring, by the dull whispers of tourists
dressed in cutoffs, pastels, deck shoes, too sunburned to spend
another day at the beach, by the thanks-for-coming from the willowed
painter behind the counter.
The stairs were warped and difficult to climb. I didn’t use
the handrail, though. The summer before, when I had, the drywood
splintered, burrowed under my skin. Only after we’d gotten
into the car was Mom able to dig it out with her fingernail,
a pin she had sterilized with a match. At the top,
just to the right of the last step, the screen over the hole through which
hay had once been hoisted was covered with summer wasps
and fat bees. I braved my way by them, because, upstairs,
there was beauty: tapestries on wooden hangers, pottery
of sand and stone, statues of men with fragile legs and disfigured
heads, watercolor paintings of animal bones and broken glass.
I took the paintings one by one out of their big, wooden portfolio.
They were heavier than I thought they would be, the bottom edges
of their matboards pushing into my thigh. In each, the bones were dry,
porous, ready to turn to dust with the lightest touch. And the glass
was blue and threatening, with sharp edges.
Through a small window I saw my parents get into our station wagon.
I set the last painting back into the portfolio. As I hurried past the wasps
and bees, down the stairs, out the screen door that slapped shut
with a twang of its tight spring, I hoped that my paintings would still
be there when I could afford them.
John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit and december magazine. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist and a semifinalist for a number of book contests. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.
