Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet

Blue Waltz Perfume

| 44 Blue Waltz Perfume for Aunt Vickie-Victoria Asusena Salazar, d. Feb. 13, 1956 Even in a greasy wind it lingers on the pulse points of midnight, a summer night in 1932. If rain drips from the firs, it only serves to sharpen the mock orange sweetness that touches her earlobes and brushes the blue-black nape of her neck. Returning from mass, her feet discover a melody inside, and she dances home, lifting her wrists, circled with music, dancing past a sycamore’s heart-scraped names: Victoria plus Tom—hers will never heal, his scab over like all the dull years that follow—rooms of cold double beds after she shuts the door 45 | on his sloppy salud and Isle of Skye denials. She’ll take their girls, sharpen her barber’s scissors, hang her ring in the bird’s cage, and laugh like crazy—teach him to say, “Gimme a kiss Ricky.” “I don’t care,” and to kiss her on the lips. I wanted to take you with me to her bedside where she is still young and blooming, where her daughters twist rosaries into wet knots of sorrow, where shadows swallow her second husband, so much younger and not able to protest the annulment that will allow her last rites . . . but that’s not what I want to save. I’ll save the flight of her rippled fingers, the old songs she played by ear, Ricky scolding | 46 the latticed light that combed her shoulders, and how she could fall into a waltz like a trance, and if we close our eyes time won’t get in our way, and if we breathe in hard enough, the rusty hasp of a box might release a scent in 3/4 time— a brief flood of Blue Waltz breath the shadows have held all these years. ...