Farmer's Wife
Sometimes quiet startles her.
Hands wrist-deep in dishwater,
she stops, listens
for the tractor's thrum
trailing from the fields.
She strains at the kitchen window
for dust signals
rising from beneath the plow.
Sometimes silage-ripe air
breathes pictures of farmers she knows
with missing fingers, limbs;
one with a useless eye;
another smothered by an up-turned tractor.
Wiping sudsy hands on the lap of her apron,
she walks to where she knows he'll be.
A smile, a wave,
and she returns,
finishes what she left.
Her song travels
to where he pitches hay mid-morning,
to the barn where he milks the cows.
She calls him in
with smoke from a supper chimney
and smells of slow-cooked soup.
The Second Time I Held You
the bright lights had simmered
to indecisive March daylight.
You were newly swaddled
in a blanket of gauze,
had absorbed the antiseptic smell
of the birthing room.
Your skin had purchased an ecru tint,
you eyes had grayed.
After the pronouncement
that all ten fingers and toes
were accounted for,
that the tiny features of your face
were beautiful,
I didn't notice the arid echo
in the otherwise vigorous cry
that announced your coming,
the sound that made me hold you
the second time
like I think I might hold
a leaf-thin
delicately laced
crystal heirloom.
Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5
in A Major
Good child, he takes the method books,
ascends, descends the scales.
One day he hears a familiar voice,
a tune from another life.
The music eats him whole,
turns him inside out,
becomes a voice to find himself,
and save himself,
something more important
than hunger.
Tonight his father and I see and hear,
astonished.
Everything we know of him
spills from the wood
he wears like skin—
balance, explosion,
each deep-throated ache,
sky that spells his life.
In a room of hundreds
we are closer, even,
than blood.
September
We've circled back.
With color seeping from our cheeks and hair,
being that couple we once were,
just the two of us,
seems again a possibility.
September is knowing we can't return;
it is not wishing to.
We move enriched by five sprigs
remarkably like us,
and never farther than their daily news.
Like a checker kinged,
we order the same meals at restaurants,
prefer violin concertos,
revive in green scenery,
charge up with deep talks,
mental sparring—
the good list
outweighing what we cannot change,
and growing.
Some say September signals the end,
we slow because our bodies do.
We've learned that pausing helps us see.
We bend toward, and cherish,
the few things we're sure of.
What moves me now
is not the quick, impatient energy
that started us,
but sure moments:
your easy I love you to a son,
you tears at a daughter's leaving.
It is affirmation in your eyes,
the antics of your mind,
your understanding
when even I cannot explain.
And postscripts:
your smell, the soothing ritual
of peppermint lotion on my feet,
the hope of winter
with you.
