Your life is a length of cloth
whose measure you can’t
calculate. Your shape has changed
so many times: at sixth grade, when you
turned eighteen, before childbirth, after
childbirth, when your eldest child reached
the same age you were when you remarried.
Or it is a labyrinth of rooms filled
with various artifacts— birthday candles,
a pair of orthopedic shoes, braces;
communion veil, mismatched socks.
You find your mother’s recipe for soup
but not for fruitcake, her thimble
and needle threader but not
her sewing machine.
Nights, in winter, you stand at the counter
sifting flour, measuring salt and sugar,
proofing the dough. It takes time
for bread to rise, and no time at all for it
to be sliced, toasted, eaten. You roll pork into
a log studded with eggs, sausages, raisins.
How else will you be remembered
besides through taste?
Lately, departure has been on everyone’s minds.
The news is thick with war and terror, the deaths
of young and old. It takes effort to declare
I just want to survive, even more to live it. When
you press your mouth against another’s and say
Good night or Good morning, how simple
it feels, this belief that small, ordinary
things might still save us.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
