Michele Root-Bernstein
In the Cards
You’d come home from school to find me playing solitaire at the kitchen table, a cigarette in my mouth, ten butts in the ashtray. Sometimes I didn’t finish one before I lit up another, anxious for the lift I wanted, just out of reach. Your needling didn’t help. “Why are you playing that dumb game, Mom? What’s the matter? Mom, are you unhappy?” Protect me from the unfeeling clarity of the young. It was none of your business if the Genevan fog I carried in me from the moment of my birth would suddenly and fully obscure my view, no Swiss alps visible behind the pall of smoke, no American slopes either. For months on end there was no way out of that heavy damp, but to journey away from the city to the mountains, to ascend above the clouds. There came a time, I had no energy for the trip. I speak metaphorically, but the illness was real. I felt violated by a dizzy fatigue, by the throbbing of blood I dared not fathom. My body keened for the end approaching, but I could not bring myself to complain. It was a grace, I thought, to refuse fear.
You’d come home from school to find me playing solitaire at the kitchen table, a cigarette in my mouth, ten butts in the ashtray. Sometimes I didn’t finish one before I lit up another, anxious for the lift I wanted, just out of reach. Your needling didn’t help. “Why are you playing that dumb game, Mom? What’s the matter? Mom, are you unhappy?” Protect me from the unfeeling clarity of the young. It was none of your business if the Genevan fog I carried in me from the moment of my birth would suddenly and fully obscure my view, no Swiss alps visible behind the pall of smoke, no American slopes either. For months on end there was no way out of that heavy damp, but to journey away from the city to the mountains, to ascend above the clouds. There came a time, I had no energy for the trip. I speak metaphorically, but the illness was real. I felt violated by a dizzy fatigue, by the throbbing of blood I dared not fathom. My body keened for the end approaching, but I could not bring myself to complain. It was a grace, I thought, to refuse fear.
solitaire
ten butts in
behind the pall of smoke
on end
no way out of
the throbbing
fathom
body keened for
Note: Text is an excerpt from Michele Root-Bernstein’s “As Birds,” The MacGuffin, v. 18, no 2 (June 2001): 77-84.
About the Author
Michele Root-Bernstein devotes herself to haiku, haibun, and haiga. The former book review editor of Modern Haiku, she until recently facilitated the Michigan-based Evergreen Haiku Study Group. Her e-chapbook Wind Rose (Snapshot Press) received a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award honorable mention in 2020. She won the 2022 Snapshot Press Book Awards for her full-length collection Plainsong.