1900’s high tech vocabulary comes to mind.
Following the stapler, stethoscopes, steam locomotives, safety pins,
and tungsten steel much spoken of in our metallurgist’s family
where Dad won a Bessemer medal and we all hazarded a worry
while stepping into the Barney’s department store elevator
about metal fatigue, came this rearrangement
of antique comforts and distresses. Camphor,
eucalyptus, levomenthol, thyme, and cedar oil:
call them to mind and hearing this
you can feel already the aromatic stirrings swirl
up your sinuses. I think of embalming — myrrh
in the exotic garden setting the space ajar between death
and preservation. I thought it was named after my Dad — Vick’s —
and remember dimly him circling it on my chest
at night through the crush and press and gasp
of pertussis, how he sat by my bed through the night
when I was four, and camphor swirled like saints’ ghosts
up from the sheets. Bitter bewitching notes of turpentine
made me dream of his soaked rag in a tin in the cellar
for wiping oil paint splotches off our hands;
and paraffin — that lit my Nana’s glass lamps before the cords
came spidering across the ceilings. These ancient consolations
cleansing, opening, embrocatory magic
worked their mending sorceries toward sleep.
I have only to unscrew the small blue jar
from the shrine of my medicine cabinet’s back shelf
and trustworthy hands are anointing me again like hierophants
by night, whispering: rest and mend, and then,
you, too, go out and heal and make things strong and well.
Jennifer M Phillips
A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, and painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips’ poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling with the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock).
