Crossroads and Unholy Water

Cousin Thérèse

 Cousin Thérèse Clocks, too many clocks, ticking. I would like back the first clock my mother gave me, with gold vines and torsades swerving like Thérèse’s hair about her face. “Go, go down deep . . .” —she lets out of water-filled bags gold fish into the backyard pond. They reach for the dark, then resurface for a bubble of sun. Cousin Thérèse helps people die. At the hospice she tells the sick how Jesus stood in water to be baptized before he could one day walk over it. In small bouquets, she brings them daisies. Petite, unfailing, feminine she sits by the dying. She knows them from their profiles— horizontal, ashen traces, printed along the white echoing strips of cotton sheets. Which one has clutched her rope-braid wanting to secure his descent? How many hands have taken to their graves the fragrance from her finger tips? Whose eyes parched by the bland room still stare at her on the windshield while she drives home for supper? Life moves to unexplained fragments of music.  I miss the laughter of the old woman who gave us candy in a blue room overlooking the bay. She told us those who do not pray before sleep do not fly in their dreams. From bullets, knives, or ropes around my neck, I have lived many nightmare deaths my skin remembers long after I awake. “I can help you die too,” she whispers to me. Yes, Cousin Thérèse, I know, with your smile only, you can make me plunge, care not. ...