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Woman at Zero CelsiusAll day soup:onion, clove, bones boiling away in the air of the winter house. The husband who is never happy despite bread and light, Is telling his other wife The migration pattern of the rufous-sided towhee. I've only seen one once in the canyon. On the woodpile, or the fence past the corn. I am the wife who should remember this appearance. I am the wife who should memorize the scatter pattern of redwings. I could practice these details, walking in the dark stubble of the grasses. Rehearsing the amnesia of snow, while the winter husband, summons that wife From her long sleep of goodness: Floors swept, wood stacked ready for burning, She's the one who keeps the house. She says, think of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Measuring a life by provinces lost. The bulbs of early blooms stir, Deep in the sleep I envy. How they learn to crack to moisture, I emulate, alone in my cold, serious bed. I am wearing her pink, pink, skin, As if I was young and she wears my earnest optimism. We are quite a pair, running a vacuum, dicing potatoes. She walks up the watershed, into the small grove of aspens, Sandstone boulders carpeted in ice. I am trying so hard to be good, to be sunshine, To be anything bearable in Fahrenheit, to be someone, a woman maybe, you would smile at. If you were hidden inside this season, inside this metal January You would taste exactly this: broth wrenched from root and skeleton. Interior news. |
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Issue #22/23, October, 2001 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.