The Translation of Lady Aelfrida

Lady Aelfrida: wife of a lesser noble, herself even less important, dutiful and bored, although, even to her, in the drafty hall, Heaven is more palpable than London. Just as the priest insists.

A thousand years ago Aelfrida sits where she can overhear the men by the fire, their God-talk, while she keeps custody of her eyes, focused on her needlework; she feels the air around her sizzle with cosmic strategies: Satan slipping through the chimney-cracks for her soul, the placid hound at her feet looking up with the Virgin’s eyes, sunlight casting a cross of winter shadows against the stone and wattle of the barn, and she knows, in a moment’s unconsidered choice, she could perform miracles or be dragged away to eternal fire.

And perhaps she doesn’t even need to choose, for she rubs her aching eyes and discovers the figures in her embroidery — meant to be a neat geometric pattern on her husband’s nightgown — have turned to golden birds with the grinning faces of children and, along the hem, hybrids of deer and angels, almost joined by their red curving cocks like a scalloped border; and though she’s heard the Devil’s cock is black, no need to take the chance—unstitch (quick!) the lips of the boy-faced bird; but its white mouth, unsewn, widens and begins to sing in the voice of a small clear harp.

Then, while she tries to recall a prayer, she turns to neutering the angels (what a waste she’s made of fine thread!), but their stag-mouths open too and chorus more loudly the harp-bird’s melody; and before she can pronounce Our Father, all her uninvited visitants circle and lift her on their heavy golden wings until she is caroling with them, dancing on their shoulders, and she is being carried to Hell or Heaven, she hardly cares which, leaving only her fallen wimple on the bench.

And the men talk on, their faces toward the fire.

Blood of the Season

Dark cabbage-roses
are blossoming on my mother’s hand.
Benign senile purpura is the term
for that nothing, one small rip
calling up so much blood.

A summer of blood for both of us.
Facing two surgeries, I’m bled
every week: hemoglobin, lab work,
autologous donation (two units).
I grow my own bed of bruises from elbow to wrist
like the row of iodine flowers the doctor drew
on my burned and bandaged arm when I was two.

But it’s cold on my mind, not burns,
that mountain lake like black ice,
the swimming test I barely passed at summer camp,
teeth champing out of control inside purple lips;
the diving platform with its pale malevolent
spiders; and the last day when I swam out far,
kicking hard and fast to warm my blood,
and, turning back, saw, two yards away, gliding in parallel,
the cottonmouth upright as a charmed cobra,
cocked saber-tooth fangs.
Don’t make a fuss, they warned.

Soon I’ll be cut, drained, sewn back.
When everyone is seeking my blood,
I want to call up the calm I felt
as I swam to shore, when I drew
from my silent, scaled companion
something of its own cold blood.