Water
- Water
One day you’re bivouacked in Normandy, still in your twenties, washing your blond hair in your battle helmet with the other nurses— the rain feels good on your face, tilted up to swallow mouthfuls straight from the racing clouds.
But something you don’t notice is racing, too, measured by the black hands on your big wristwatch as you take a patient’s pulse. Seconds turn into minutes, minutes into days and years. France is an old album. Your children have children.
Today you put a sponge into your mouth moistening your tongue. You don’t dare drink. Water could trickle down into your lungs. Your damaged brain must be retrained to use the throat muscles, says the speech therapist,
who shows us how to pour in the corn starch until the orange juice thickens up like honey. You take a gritty spoonful, say it makes your gorge rise going down, “not like, not like”— you struggle with the words and I supply
“rainwater in Normandy?”—a memory you gave me as a child, that I still keep— hedgerows, an orchard, and the cheerful nurses out in the storm, rinsing the suds from their hair— the future so distant it seems to not exist. [End Page 27]
Maura Stanton’s poems and stories have appeared in the Southwest Review, the Antioch Review, the Atlantic, Brilliant Corners, the Southern Poetry Review, the Crab Orchard Review, Cerise Press, Fifth Wednesday, and River Styx. Her poems have been broadcast on the BBC Radio 3 Program Words and Music and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writers Almanac. Her sixth book of poetry, Immortal Sofa, was published by the University of Illinois Press.
