Shut up, Gladys

Full of opinions, he held court
while she sat quietly by.
They'd come for a visit, a neighborly occasion.
He pounded his knee with a fisted hand.
The vein on his neck like a gathering snake.
She said, Now dear?
And he said, Shut up, Gladys.
Can't you see I'm talking?

Sundays she recited from the Book of Common Prayer
could repeat the Our Father and the Very God of Very God,
sing hymns and deliver Amens, chant
All things come of Thee, O Lord,
and the Confession of Sins.

A devout woman, who polished
the altar brass each Saturday,
she subsided into wifely obedience.

Prepared next time to sit in silence,
she smiled pleasantly at her hostess,
and with those fingers that each week
arranged flowers for Morning Prayer
and made the chalice gleam
she drew yarn from the skein
and looped it over the needle.

He glowered in mid-harangue and said,
Gladys, put that knitting down.
Can't you see I'm talking?
Without a sigh, she laid her hands in her lap
and sat idle, looking in his direction.

She was born with the ability to utter
all the sounds in all the languages on earth,
the potential to speak the words of
Shakespeare, Goethe, Lao Tse.

After he stroked out and set her free,
she opened her mouth and no sound came.
Those little weeds of other voice he'd rooted out
so relentlessly from his garden,
those small bands stretched across the larynx,
would not respond, had lost the will
to tense and vibrate
lay useless as the old garters
fallen round her ankles.

She could not bark, cry, howl, groan, growl, or chirp.
Could not call for a bedpan or a bowl of soup.
Now she sits, staring, unmoving.

The wafer had once melted on her tongue.
The wine had moistened her throat.

©Barbara Fryrear 2003