Tarot: Page of Wands

 (c) 3/19/2022

The Page of Wands always stoops

to smell the roses, or to sneak

Spreading Phlox between the pavers.

Equal parts haphazard and methodical,

she generates ideas while planting seeds.

My Great-Aunt Winnie loved the garden.

She labored beside the work crew that planted

crocus’s and daffodils each spring

in the concrete planter bowls straddling the entrance. 

Flowers were intended to make visitors feel welcome.

Winnie had no visitors. Not her mother.

Not any of her five brothers. But then,

taking time for family can be such an inconvenience.

 

More than anything, Winifred loved to listen to music.

Music soothes the soul and the Page of Wands

by default of immaturity faces challenges.

Whatever journey she began back home

The Queen circumnavigated it and

had Winnie institutionalized here

among catatonics and their colonic irrigations,

among palliatives, shocks, and needles.

Access to a turntable took finagling the one attendant

who wasn’t easily agitated. Even Glen Miller and

Gene Autry become irritating when over-played.

 

Winnie was, my father said, a talented pianist.

“She spent her time playing for the inmates

and probably felt fulfilled.”

 

The Page of Wands is modest, and Winnie

may not have realized she had been sterilized.  

The Page is a dreamer, an idealist,

whose energy uncoils as optimism,

and maybe Winnie felt fulfilled

Sundays after lunch, plunking out As Time Goes By

or Blue Moon on the auditorium piano.

Capable hands her mother saw no use for at home.