Ingrid Ruthig
Portrait
The woman as a puzzle sees herself rarely in whole:
a quick mirrored blur, an elbow banged and rubbed,
hands placing bread in slices on a plate.
She watches the hands grasp a knife and smudge
butter, then lay cheese, or tuck plums in formation,
shaping a noon meal for family. She thinks:
These are my hands. They move as they’ve always
moved – fingers never still with gripping, releasing,
splayed, or curled into themselves.
Yet these hands differ from my memory of them. Skin
has worked a fine fretwork of lines, a tapestry on
tendons and veins, fleshed-out bone. The knuckles
often swell or are stiff. How has this happened, when?
As the backs of hands should be known, she knows them
and still, they could be someone else’s.
They move through the days’ endless tasks, ignored –
like the pressure of her feet on cool tile,
the shape of the tip of her nose, or the tug of hair
at scalp under the hanging weight of water –
they are familiar, and strangers if examined.
The body acts mostly as she asks it to, despite
the adding of many years’ scars, lines, and sags.
It hasn’t reached an age where it screams
for her to stop doing what needs to be done.
Don’t call the woman by the name she was given,
the one she mouthed vows for, or even the sound
of her child’s first word. The woman is me and is not:
she’s the woman in a house on a street somewhere.
The knife’s spun to the floor, a cut plum seeps blood,
the hands plunge into water and ache with its glassy cold.
The picture shimmers above and the face
becomes clear, its terrible truth resurfacing.
She’s about to claim her unbearable discovery –
a quick mirrored blur, an elbow banged and rubbed,
hands placing bread in slices on a plate.
She watches the hands grasp a knife and smudge
butter, then lay cheese, or tuck plums in formation,
shaping a noon meal for family. She thinks:
These are my hands. They move as they’ve always
moved – fingers never still with gripping, releasing,
splayed, or curled into themselves.
Yet these hands differ from my memory of them. Skin
has worked a fine fretwork of lines, a tapestry on
tendons and veins, fleshed-out bone. The knuckles
often swell or are stiff. How has this happened, when?
As the backs of hands should be known, she knows them
and still, they could be someone else’s.
They move through the days’ endless tasks, ignored –
like the pressure of her feet on cool tile,
the shape of the tip of her nose, or the tug of hair
at scalp under the hanging weight of water –
they are familiar, and strangers if examined.
The body acts mostly as she asks it to, despite
the adding of many years’ scars, lines, and sags.
It hasn’t reached an age where it screams
for her to stop doing what needs to be done.
Don’t call the woman by the name she was given,
the one she mouthed vows for, or even the sound
of her child’s first word. The woman is me and is not:
she’s the woman in a house on a street somewhere.
The knife’s spun to the floor, a cut plum seeps blood,
the hands plunge into water and ache with its glassy cold.
The picture shimmers above and the face
becomes clear, its terrible truth resurfacing.
She’s about to claim her unbearable discovery –
Ingrid Ruthig lives near Toronto. Her work has been published across Canada and internationally, in journals and anthologies, as well as in translation.
Page(s) 21
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