Thank you for laughing each time
I aver, “Who is Samuel Pepys?” when
the Jeopardy category pings “Diarists.”
I thank grad school for resurfacings,
the tedious pages worth a chilly May,
Hampton Court morning around
the corner where some costumed King
Henry adjusts blue velvet cuffs, offers
guests winks, wisteria patches traipsing
purple along brick walls. You leave for real
tennis viewing while I warm in the Chapel,
a Royal steward my new mate who details
below floor Victorian heating flanking
Jane Seymour’s green gallbladder. No other
tourists around, he shifts
his head as if preparing to cross streets,
leans closer, then loud whispers a question
I’m sure he’s bottled for weeks:
You know Samuel Pepys?,
and before I can nod, he unbuttons the red
waistcoast, his Tudor Crest patch disappearing,
and I wonder if he’ll display rows of fake
watches like a shady tv character. No, I am
not scared or nervous when he produces
scissors, I think, smiling at me, them palmed
flat for high regard.
He had stones, bladder ones,
he informs, his hand rising with each word,
so pleased he seems to clarify “forceps,” as in
those used to remove Pepys’s pain. So many
questions clog my cords, my larynx, did he know
I’d be his audience today, and what do seventeenth
century tools go for on ebay these days?, still
he marvels at surgery without anesthesia, greets
your reentry, and I thank him for his time.
At the gift shop on our way out, I try on the Boleyn
stacking rings, how seamlessly the “B” fits into
pearled band, yet all I want is to run back, search
the gardens’ gravel borders and paths for any
cloudy or misshapen pieces in honor, homage, stones
rescued, revered not solely for Pepys’s pages,
but to etern on his chamber’s mantel.
Amy S Lerman
Amy Lerman, by way of Florida, Illinois, England, and Kansas, lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert, where she is a residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press), won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest. She has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Atticus Review, Muleskinner, The Madison Review, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and other publications.
