Free Swann by Carol Shields

already. I’m due at an anti-apartheid rally in four hours. Hurry.
    I try again. (Oh, that miraculous little green clearing key!) “Thinning radishes was for Swann an emblem for …”
    Wait a minute, hold on there. There’s a gap that needs explaining, a synapse too quickly assumed. What kind of express train am I driving anyway? Radishes to ultimate truth?—that’s the leap of a refined aesthete. How did Mary Swann, untaught country woman, know how to make that kind of murky metaphorical connection. Who taught her what was possible?
    “Mary Swann was deeply influenced by … ”
    Back to the same old problem: Mary Swann hadn’t read any modern poetry. She didn’t
have
any influences.
    Thinking of Swann makes me think, with the kind of double-storied memory that comes out of family annals, of my grandfather, my father’s father, a machinist by trade, a man who worked with his hands, long dead by the time I was born. He was a quiet contemplative man from all reports, who ran his small business out of a shed behindhis house in what is now Evergreen Park. Over the years, cutting and shaping sheets of metal, he noticed that there existed peculiar but constant relationships between the different sides of triangles. He kept a record of this odd information, and after a time he was able to discern measurable patterns. Keeping the discovery to himself, he spent several years working up an elaborate table of numerical relationships that was, in essence, an ordinary logarithm chart. He had reinvented trigonometry, or so my father used to say, and when, years later, he found out that it had already been done, he just laughed and threw his charts away. An amazing man. A genius.
    In somewhat the same manner, I like to think, Mary Swann invented modern poetry. Her utterances, the shape of them, are spun from their own logic. Without knowing the poetry of Pound or Eliot, without even knowing their names, she set to work. Her lines have all the peculiar rough thrusts and the newly made syntactical abrasions that are the mark of the prototype. You can’t read her poems without being aware that a form is in the process of being created.
    “Poetry at the forge level,” I hurl into the word processor, and then I’m off, shimmying with concentration, tap-tapping my way down the rosy road toward synthesis.
17
    The first words my mother utters when she comes out of the anaesthetic are: “Your face is dirty, dear.”
    My hand flies to my cheek.
    It’s a bruise actually, the result of a scuffle at the rally, a brief, confused scuffle now that I stop and think about it, a case of my own steaming exuberance, then turning my headat the wrong instant and meeting an elbow intended for someone else. Not that my mother needs to know any of
this
. Anyway, she’s drifting back to sleep now with her large, soft, dolorous hand tucked in mine. With my free hand I fish in my bag for the chocolates I intend to leave on her bedside table.
    She’s in a room with four other patients, but I passionately resist the notion that she has anything to do with this moaning team of invalids. I’ve already spoken with Dr. LeBlanc and with the surgeon. They were smiling, the two of them, leaning against a hospital wall, freshly barbered as doctors always seem to be, their thumbs hooked in the pockets of their greenies. The news they imparted was good, wholly positive, in fact: the lump removed from my mother’s side this morning was not, as they had feared, the pulpy sponge of cancer but a compacted little bundle of bone and hair, which, they told me, was a fossilized fetus, my mother’s twin sibling who somehow, in the months before her own birth, became absorbed into her body. A genuine medical curiosity, one of the devilish pranks the human body plays on itself from time to time.
    She’s carried her lump all these years, unknowing, a brother or sister, shrunk down to walnut size and keeping itself quiet. Now it has been removed, and my mother’s