Not to be confused with the little wooden priapus
that waltzed a sleepy girl across the room,
nor with the dance itself, although you could
make some connections — the fanged quality
of the gift with this, my story. And then
there's the holiday supper in both, too: warm
flannel nightgowns and wird adults
hanging around, like the cousin-once-removed,
burned to death in her bed smoking cigarettes
alone, nodding over movie magazines.
She watched us say our prayers together
every Christmas Eve. Or my father's so-called
bachelor uncle whose favorite present
was the fifth he cradled in the crook
of his arm like old Joseph in a crèche
and carried safely back to his room
in a rooming house in the worst part
of town. These and others all would gather
at my grandmother's between the moment Venus
blinked and midnight mass. But where was she?
Even when the plate piled high with
pecans, almonds, chestnuts, and Brazil nuts
arrived, and the cracking began, a chorus of knuckle
bones, shells scuttling across the tablecloth,
deep digging for the walnuts' meat, a last dessert,
she was nowhere to be seen. My grandfather's
nutcracker. I'd found her one day, I guess
by accident, cached in a velvet-lined drawer
of the china server with fancy matches
and the flamingo-shaped cocktail stirrers
we sometimes played with. She was half a woman
— from the waist down — smooth, dark, and wooden,
etched with buttocks and a belly button, and hinged
so that her legs spread wide open and right
below her crotch (they said to call it that as if trees
themselves were virginal) each thigh was notched
deep enough to hold a whole nut still, for cracking.
Yet they never used her, as far as I saw.
Never did my kindly grandfather, who blushed
at all obscenity and once, they say, confessed
to a priest about his lust rising as he watched
a movie orgy on TV, reach into the drawer
where I knew he kept her. I took her out,
secretly. I clicked her empty legs like castanets.