Poems by Regina Weiss

Idyll

by Regina Weiss

From Canary Summer 2023

Regina lives a short walk from the Hudson River estuary in Brooklyn, New York, where she begins most days watching all kinds of life in her tiny garden. She is happy to be surrounded by migratory birds, venerable trees, racoons, possums, woodchucks, skunks, red tail hawks and bald eagles.

When Shoshana won that first election her breastbone and then her clavicle sopped up the violence, the stomping, whistling, clapping caldron she found herself immersed in; she felt the whisper of too many balloons released from the ceiling net brush strands of hair across her ear as they fell to confuse her ankles, but all she heard was the sultry gravel of her grandmother’s voice, that lifelong touchstone for whatever was right in the world. Thereafter, whenever she was tempted to succumb to the ethic-numbing, soul-deflating effects of political life – self-important donors, self-serving colleagues, distraught constituents she couldn’t help – Shoshana pulled herself together by listening for Nana Grizelda’s counsel, offered in her pebble-inflected cello of a drawl.

Grizelda had died a decade ago in the garden at Shoshana’s parents’ house on a dry hot summer day inflated with insect hum and bird call. She’d died reclining on her back in a bed of salt hay, under patches of sharp blue sky framing the downturned heads of a half-dozen Giant Russia sunflowers she’d planted months earlier that were ready to be cut down, soaked, dried, roasted, and consumed.

When Shoshana went out to the garden that day and saw her grandmother’s body, a sharp, surreal moment of awe caught her breath in a suspended shriek and held it deep in her chest against her belly, leaving her unable to move or make a sound. When the moment had passed, she instinctively got down on the ground to stretch out alongside her Nana there in the garden as she had done so many times for as long as she could remember, the hay grinding softly beneath her earlobes as it cradled her head, the starched sleeve of her grandmother’s dress rustling dryly as Shoshana reached for the old woman’s hand, disturbing the stack of painted banyan-wood bracelets that always encircled her grandmother’s dusty arms. The smooth clicks of wood on wood so startled Shoshana that for a moment she believed she’d been mistaken, that her Nana was merely asleep although, of course, she knew better from the countless afternoons and midnights she’d shared her grandmother’s bed. The older woman never slept in silence. How many times had Shoshana been thrust up from sleep horrified that a train or a truck was about to wipe her out, only to realize it was her grandmother’s labored breathing that so startled her? No, Grizelda would be silent only in death.

Settling deep into the warm hay now, Shoshana sought to gather what would have been Grizelda’s last moments with the world, wondering which of its details had most engaged her. She rubbed the straw and earth beneath her as the old woman would have caressed it with her own back, head, and limbs as she expired.

During those final moments had she gotten lost in the bright rippling greens of maple and ash at the far end of the garden? In the ochre-edged sunflower petals cupping cragged cushions of black-striped seeds waving in the foreground of this brilliant blue sky?

When Grizelda’s eyes finally closed, did she still smell her surroundings and treasure the scent of hay and compost and plant breath fading into August for a few lovely moments before leaving her body and its pleasures behind?

What was her very last sensation? Was it the sun's warmth on her body, its light filtering through the thin moist shades of her eyelids, or a breeze playing with her dress hem, tickling her knees?

But no, Shoshana thought, the cynosure would have been Nana’s most beloved vibration, the one she herself noticed now as she fully focused on channeling the woman whose flesh lay beside her. The raucous frenzy of peepers from the ancient black cherry at the far end of the deep yard was gathering still, growing richer, louder, faster, thicker, concentrating the pounding of Shoshana’s heart at the back of her throat. She closed her eyes, reaching for the sound with each cell, urging her being to wholly enter the crazed synchronistic singing of the morning peepers chirping out their blissful lust, gratitude for the very existence of the tiny frenzied invisible amphibians washing over her. After a long, long listening, she opened her eyes and glanced at Grizelda’s silver swatch of tangled hair, her deeply carved forehead.

Thus Shoshana’s last visit with her grandmother was completed, lying together one last time in the garden Grizelda had planted when her granddaughter was born and had tended ever since, all the while teaching Shoshana and her brother everything she knew about plants, about the order of the world, which was a great deal.

Shoshana’s father was so pissed. He’d been so careful to say there was no emergency, to avoid the disturbance of sirens entering the day, still the ambulance barked once, twice, as it drew into the circular drive of the low slung house. The medics thrashing around in the corn, knocking over the sturdy stalks of the Russian Giants while trying to position a stretcher next to the corpse had drawn a crowd of neighbors. Aaron Ramirez was certain to his core that his mother had died out there in the yard deliberately, just to embarrass the family.

Shoshana didn’t try to reason with him. Her Nana had known how to love without reservation. That ability had somehow bypassed her children but had become her greatest gift to Shoshana and all her other grandchildren. So as her father quietly ranted, Shoshana kept listening to her grandmother’s voice. “Take all that you know and begin,” Grizelda told her.