By Jeanne Julian
You search the jumbled scarves, scrambling through the top drawer
for heirloom earrings inherited
from your mother, your haste
making the mess into a tangle
of slippery interwoven colors
reminding you of that place—
that place you heard of, long ago,
some offbeat destination, Lake C…,
Lake C…? a rinky-dink tourist trap
where fish, accustomed to tossed bits
of Wonder Bread, mass and churn,
frantic for the food, fish so plentiful
they weave a rippling carpet underneath
the webbed feet of hungry ducks
also scavenging for scraps.
Where the Ducks Walk on the Fish,
the postcards said. A phenomenon you never saw. Though the phrase stayed
with you, the name of the lake, the body
of water (beginning with C?) faded away.
Now decades later, her dimming memory
dimming in yours, your hands immersed
in fabric feel blindly for the velvet box
holding precious stones your mother
now dead wore. Stirred silks release
familiar fragrance—your own scent, there—
that ordinarily unnoticed essence, separate.
You’ve stumbled upon yourself,
as when you’re dead the confusion
of faintly perfumed scarves will remind
someone of you, or maybe only J….
J Somebody…? they’ll say, there being
too many generations, too many layers,
too much mixed up to recover
the set, the match, the whole.
Memory needs memory underfoot.
You forget: before her mind
dissolved, did your mother share
such random reminiscences?
Did you ever tell her—or anyone?
—about that humble miracle,
ducks walking on fish
(if you remember right)….
But you’re hurried, fumbling, heedless.
The hard diamonds find your ear,
but whisper nothing.
The lake keeps its secrets.
Jeanne Julian is author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems are in Kakalak,
Panoply, RavensPerch, Ocotillo Review and elsewhere, and have won awards from Reed
Magazine, Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and Maine Poets’ Society. She regularly
reviews books for The Main Street Rag. http://www.jeannejulian.com
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