Roberts, Sheila

English

University of Calgary Journal Hosting

Doris, my Polish Aunt, is Dead She was an unawed Fundamentalist, retelling (large Slavic eyes like Ikons) those ancient wonders as if all were quite routine — An Adam and an Eve set on an empty earth, and the blind and deaf given senses in marvels every day and place. She had known ghosts, she said, most familiarly, felt them and understood their credible intentions : had even survived by incantation a scorpion's thrice-whipping sting from the sand floor of her immigrant parents' farm. I grew unknowingly to need her unastonished glance that, listening, glowed as if my fate and that of all our kin had been of old forescrolled. Even now I see the highveld sun crushed through the coarse lace curtains, scattering jagged confetti on her greying haloed hair. She sewed most days, turning the wheel seeming without touch. She cut and sewed and told of her few schooldays; once how the girl next door scratched the lice and had to have her head clean shaved : how on the South-West border farms wild animals infused with restless human souls walked, searching, in the night. Her second-sight, her placidness, was an immense still lake between the hills of our gloomy adolescence — my cousins and I skulking, vexed, pretending deafness to her low belling voice. I always must recall her sewing for me only a blue dress cut on a circle, skirt lifting platelike to my waist when I twirled the jive steps she hated so ; and her own vain times when I wound her wirehard hair into curls, or stood for her, a sulky statue, as she used my frame to pin a leisured, paying, Johburg lady's hem. They wrote how she had deafened first (then died), staring in contentious silence, quite withdrawn, eyes cauled beneath hair sprung like silver coils about a pale, time-spiting face. Immediately, now, I need to tell her of my ways, my wants, and watch her unperturbed ordain (I, happy, smiling, do disbelieve) these accolades and fears and pains are legislated mine ; are rightly to be clasped by me, by her. So, for a moment, pleasured, without will, charmed by her cosmic order, I might even seem to listen for a nonexistent spirit's wings. S H E I L A R O B E R T S 

Doris, my Polish Aunt, is Dead

https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/download/32583/26635

Doris, my Polish Aunt, is Dead

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of Calgary Journal Hosting