The Afro Pick
Suddenly I remember Dellaree’s comb,
how she inserts it into her hair
and makes small interventions, at right angles,
here and there,
methodically,
like a cat coming in
and sitting down to groom itself,
licking its paw
and drawing it over its head, its face,
in a concentrated, meditative way –
or like someone putting the finishing touches on a dish,
doing the last little things
before serving
The memory of Dellaree and the black hard-plastic comb –
which, with its narrow handle
and its closely spaced, decimetre-long teeth,
vaguely resembles a kind of pitchfork –
and the elegant pose;
arm raised in the air, elbow out and up,
wrist gracefully bent,
fingers around the handle
as though holding a surgical instrument,
and how she applies the long teeth
to the dense mangrove hair –
explodes without warning,
out of nowhere and long ago,
on this sharply sunlit October morning in the East bedroom
at Noret farm in Norrbotten’s Niemisel, 2026,
as winter sends its first messengers
with falling temperatures
and cowering columns of mercury;
an Afro-pick memory of Dellaree Gibson-Östnäs,
unlocking an entire life
that stretched from May 28, 1949, San Francisco,
to February 9, 1992, Varberg,
and whom I first met in the spring of 1970
at her and Emanuel’s home
on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn,
when they were both working at Max’s Kansas City
over on Park Avenue;
a flash-image memory; a characteristic memory of a pose
I often saw her in,
when they lived in the old house they had found
at Lilla Strömgatan 3 in Nyköping,
in a way acting out
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s song Our House
out on the veranda overlooking the backyard;
a sudden memory,
a wormhole into another dimension
that lives on in all simplicity
deep in the glacial crevasses of consciousness,
today even carrying Dellaree’s perfume
and voice –
and some things she said
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-10-11 at 10:35
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