Old Medicine

 by Elizabeth Oxley

Once every week, Larry drives to the nursing home

from his downtown beauty salon to paint

my grandmother’s fingernails red. Her eyes

are cloudy. He shakes the bottle. I see him

when I drop by to kiss her quiet cheek. The television

blares snowstorm news as Larry draws his brush

across her yellow ridges, by a window overlooking

fields shorn to the corn-quick, spare woods

where hawthorn each year sprouts its blood-berry,

white petals a flotilla of land-stars, floral storehouse

for cosmic remedy. Before plastic bottles of pills,

there was willow bark for fever, the sage hand

scavenging medicinal roots and leaves. And what

of the hand itself? Its love was present in the poultice.

Larry separates my grandmother’s fingers—

thinning feathers through which pale sky passes.

Her smile blooms blank against the backdrop of a hissing

oxygen machine. I watch from the door, the nurse

murmuring any day now. Larry gives my grandmother

an extra coat, and she lives three weeks more.