1957

Sheaths of sweetgrass, gold like wedding bands in 1957.

Ancient as the dirt, this ritual, and we were so young.

Only for a moment, our hearts shot through,

possessed in the act of falling like a buck and doe,

while the tiny fawn, embryonic, writhed within my womb.

There was an off-white dress and a charcoal suit.

There was a champagne-coloured sky.

There was a shout of disapproval from the church pews,

or did we imagine it, for dramatic effect?

We were so young.

The bells deep and the organ off-tune.

The leaves falling like glitter on the lawn.

That first burnished autumn when the geese were heading south,

shifting ink blots above the steeple of the white country church.

The real Rorschach was the way our signatures would come to bleed as one.

In laughing orchards the long days turned us to candle wax,

and we drove a muscle car and drank cheap liquor

that tasted sweet as honey and sharp as a poison arrow.

The daylight hunted nothing but the moon;

stars bolted from angels playing darts.

Black satin, pearl-drops—

mink and fox and ermine coats, snake-leather,

increasingly headier drinks and cigarettes and airplanes and a family of four.

There was white cotton, schoolgirl dresses, endless needles and threads.

There was no time to read but always time to gather grapes,

to bake pecan tarts and call home the cats from the fields,

to sew sweaters for our daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters.

Under skies bleached denim,

we toiled with hardened hands to cultivate flower upon flower, plant upon plant.

In the garden now is a bloom of death-red opium,

poppies that melt in the summer heat:

such beauty in the vulgarity of a world itself needing palliative care.

In my veins morphia now stirs like sugar into tea.

I always shiver under my cardigan.

In our ice-block of a home there are broken teeth and blood on a tile,

a dusty mirror and a sun-bleached couch,

rusted pipes where the dregs of ghosts seek drainage.