Fiercely Awake

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Four poems by Vancouver Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau on aging, aching and orthotics. Read more of Evelyn Lau's Geist work here.

GALLBLADDER

Who knew you were even there?
Tucked under the liver, a shrivelled
and sunken pear, small sac, treasure bag
of stones, a stitch in my side—
you are chewing me up from the inside,
your constant gnawing, your spastic contortions
bruising the liver, sending its gamma readings soaring.
When you attack, women say
it’s like childbirth, without the happy ending.

You wake me in the night, announce yourself
just under the ribcage, to the right,
you who slept so soundly for decades,
pink and plump, now fiercely awake
and complaining, mottled black
and diseased. I’ve fed you a rich diet
of sugar and fat, groomed myself into
alliteration, the typical gallbladder patient—
a fat, fertile, forty-year-old female.

The surgeon wants to snatch you,
wiggle you out from the nest of innards
and extract you through a slit in my side,
but I want you to stay a while longer—
your little screeching voice,
your bilious mouth pushing out and pushing out
its stuck stones, wedged in your neck
like olive pits. You keep me in thrall
with your appetite for pain,
your possibility of rupture.


VAGINA

The indignity of seeing you change,
even you. Your lips used to be springy
to the touch, a miniature trampoline,
a little fat cushion of flesh. It seems someone
let all the stuffing out. Now the inner labia,
once so tidy and trim, are stretched
and distended, and sometimes poke out
like the tip of a tongue in a cruel tease.

That’s all you want me to say about you.
Lately you’ve grown reticent as a maiden aunt
in your middle age, desiring flannel nightgowns
and ten o’clock bedtimes. So open to proposition
in your prime, it won’t be long before
you grow a white fur, prepare for hibernation.

FEET
A doctor once exclaimed, Those are some ugly feet!

These days you don’t even look human—
nothing like a model’s feet in a magazine,
slim and straight as kayaks,
squelching in the sparkly sand.
You resemble the plaster model
in the podiatrist’s office, the one he uses
to demonstrate deformities.
Your bunions, knobs of throbbing bone
at the base of the big toe, have given birth
to bunionettes. Your hammer toes
are scrunched into claws, as if forever
trying to grasp at something not there.
Plantar fasciitis renders the morning’s first steps
like those of the mermaid’s on land,
a dance on knife points.

Still, I feel a motherly affection for you,
the runt of the litter, take you into my hands
on winter nights and rub. Caked with calluses,
studded with seed corns, you are like the old woman
on the bus who wears a purple hat
strung with birds and fruit and jingly bells—
a dropout in the race for beauty,
conformity. The years I stuffed you into stilettos
long gone, now I coddle you
with custom orthotics, sensible shoes
cozy as moccasins. Soon you’ll be granted
your lifelong wish and live out the rest
of your days in Birkenstocks—
you’ll be walking on air!

LOST AND FOUND
Somehow the custom orthotic, a slip of plastic
worth hundreds of dollars, worked its way out
of my sandal in the rough landscape
of the lunar beach and hid
amidst sandcastles and firepits,
chips of charcoal and tangles of kelp.
We combed and combed the shore,
the waning light against us. Watermelon moon
in the cotton candy sky. It seemed then
that this life was a collection of losses,
a slipping down an ever steeper slope,
shedding possessions and loved ones until,
at the last, we shed our own mottled coat of flesh,
this ragged lumpy lived-in self.
Where had the California beauty gone,
though the sun was setting
behind the lifeguard’s blue hut,
the surf drumming? All we found
was what others had lost—
a sneaker, two battered cellphones,
a guitar pick wedged into the sand
like a tiny surfboard. Row of burnt palms
behind the lighthouse, decomposing sea lion
in the rank breeze.

The next morning we returned to the beach,
holding out hope like metal detectors, and there,
in front of me, gleaming like the foot-bone
of an exotic animal, the orthotic!
To find something, after so many losses!
The photograph of that moment shows me
with arms raised in religious ecstasy,
eyes closed and mouth open in a half-mad
silent song of hallelujah. You would have thought
I was calling down the spirits from the next world.
That someone I loved had come back to me
from the place where no one returns. Here in Santa Cruz,
where a man in rags shakes his finger
at the heavenly blue sky, shouting,
Your mother was a hamster,
and your father smelled of elderberry!