which means most of the time no one knows
how much Marie is with me,
inside my right leg in particular,
behind the knee. After a while of standing,
it throbs and I have to shift
my weight and it is difficult for me to listen
to what someone wants from me
because I am in standing in my garden in Brooklyn
with a pair of scissors to trim the white rosebush
my apron splattered with sauce.
I called her Nanny, but her name was Marie.
I can’t say I don’t mind having her blood
running through her varicose veins
but if someone has to, I’m glad it is me.
I don’t garden, but I do make her sauce
and yesterday I accidentally bought four boxes
of lemon cake mix at Trader Joe’s
because I like to serve it in the summers
with berries but then I remembered there was only
me and my husband to serve it to now that the kids
are gone, and that’s a lot of cake.
I thought of Marie’s roses blooming
for no one and her sauce uselessly simmering.
Marie came to this country on a ship
called the Giuseppe Verdi
on December 17, 1920. She was nine.
I don’t know about you, but I like knowing this.
It adds a certain glamour to me sitting here
in these thigh-high compression hose
that I have to wear for three days
after my first round of sclerotherapy
like a cast, the doctor said, so on the third day
I stink like Sylvia’s Esther
who wore her green dirndl skirt and white blouse
that she borrowed from Betsy for three weeks straight.
The hose has grown a little
damp, and my legs are now things
I lug around, lifting them in and out of bed,
you know like all of history, like my poor Nanny
who lived before sclerotherapy,
with her husband Frank who was what they call
no good, drinking in the garage, throwing
plates, ripping the phone from the wall.
Google says sclerotherapy is a relatively
painless procedure for most people,
and I’d like to meet these most people
because I had to bite my knuckle each
of the twenty times the doctor shot
the medicine into my veins, which burns
as it travels, and still
I cried out, which then I had to apologize for,
and the doctor, whose name is Megan,
offering me a side of therapy,
said, It’s okay to cry out when I’m hurting you,
and I said, thank you, and she said,
It’s so cool, watching the medicine move through the vein.
