Ostinato

so you want a story, a story, a sequence of events, a lei of events I will lay over your head please bend your head ever so slightly to receive the garland a wreath of flowers many out of season plucked from the blooming sometimes crushed by wind and flattened by weather garden of my story. my dead sister marches in holding her cello by its neck in her left hand, the bow in the right sits down adjusts her skirts to receive the cello between her legs and prepares to play the ostinato but not yet. pegs the instrument in one of dozens of holes in the plywood plank rounded in a kidney shape a hole for one of the chair legs to hold it flat and steady my father made for his daughter brilliant cellist with perfect teeth and blackest hair. but the story cannot dip and rise around the slope of the narrative arc and there must be a narrative arc that you the reader can mount without falling off to one side flooded with the moon shadows that kept me awake at night when I could not sleep after I burned the letter in the toilet I wrote to my sister date raped and banished to a jackson, michigan house of some random cousins to have the baby and our stepmother found the letter. that is a chasm into which you might fall but don’t worry I won’t drop you for that is the nature of complicated love you may want to drop someone but you don’t. so on we go one foot in front of the other on the slippery knife-edge which admit it is kind of thrilling because there is no expectation of anything from you just walk with me and finally all of these words will begin to separate into their component letters and then it will be your chance to shake them all together in the velvet bag with the drawstring frayed from a lot of opening and closing made by your grandmother that once held a very old and valuable pocket watch. and that will be your story the one you will braid into mine while my sister waits to play the ostinato with the bow raised in the living room next to the baby grand piano she could also play without looking at music and changing keys at will it was I say exhilarating to hear her play. just 15 steps from there down a tiny narrow passageway into the little downstairs bathroom without a bathtub where my father would administer the punishment required by my stepmother when he came home from work and loosened his tie and we had to get the strap cut into tails from the back of the silverware drawer but any more on this and you would slip from my grasp into the other chasm too deep to haul you out. my sister does not drop her bow arm but you know she is waiting to play the ostinato and here is the moment to take one deep breath and breathe in the pine sap scent of rosin on the horsehairs of her bow and now she presses her fingers to the strings with the fingers of her left hand with its bitten nails which turns out to be helpful for a cellist and I sucked my thumb. we were not too good at self-soothing but we did all we could. and now we are passing through a nighttime which makes my next footsteps risky because I cannot see but inches before me but I will not let go your hand because we must track a true and steady course through a thicket of stories and thorns. but we two have done this before no matter scratches even the ones that bleed and the yellow jacket sting that almost killed me and in delirium in summertime in pajamas at the doctor’s house just before the shot of adrenalin to keep my heart beating I saw a brightly lit and twinkling christmas tree. the sadder you might get in a swarm of stories the lusher the lei you can wrap around your neck, one bloom from this story, another bloom from that story a few in decay and a cluster of buds not open yet and then you will know again that sometimes the best stories are not stories at all but mergings. my sister lets the bow drop onto the strings and we hear the ostinato’s melodic fragment so small and insistent chimed and repeated singing from the cluster of stories leading us forward to no destination.

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Paula Bernett’s poetry has been widely published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod International Journal, and Rattle, among others. Her lyric essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Eastern Iowa Review and others. Her essay “How a Person Becomes a Body” was published by Gigantic Sequins, and nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. She’s now working on a memoir in scenes.