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A Woman Alone, Next Season:A woman alone eats ice cream, something with swirls and nuts. Spoons all the softersweet off the lid, scoops round and round the sides, making a mountain out of Peach trees bud, then bloom pink blossoms. Very tiny and fragrant. Plum also, except the flowers are white. Forsythia. Yellow. Irises make fat tiny fists push out of their slender fans. Try as she might, she cannot remember their color, from last year. Then can. In the garden, the names come back slowly: Gallardia, borage. Something coming huge, looks tulipish, right, it was the allium, and so on. It's pass-fail, open book, we'll tell you later. She calms down, clears the beds for new decisions. She used to clean the garden beds in Fall. Then in early spring. It was too hard to know what was still viable. Now she waits for stuff to die. Really die. That works. A woman alone gardens all day into night, puts in a bed of diathanus, different colors, worries over it, digs them up, moves them. Moves the lupine from the bed they didn't make it in. The lavender is still limping along, can't find where it likes. She moves the hose, puts in a bed of chard and zinnas, moves the hose, puts in the delphinium, moves the hose, digs up the delphinium, so on. She has killed the Russian sage again. It is the plant he loves. One year she cut it back, by accident. It never grew again, not really. He planted more Russian sage before he left in the fry and die of May, told her to keep them alive. They weren't hardened off, but he was. Shopping has set in. Many candles and lemon ginko, aloe something very uv , something called Na-NCP, a heavy duty protein conditioner and 3 already roasted chickens. She buys Dead Sea salts for the bath, because she is definitely at sea. She wishes this was really about skin care. She buys him Hero blueberry and blackberry jam, but he may not be coming back. At least she'll have preserves. She had the Hierophant in her endless Tarot consultations and an online psychic says that's not good news. What is? She got the Gathering Wind hexagram. It had two changing lines, becoming Family. That's that time. Nights are given over to oracle after oracle. The runes come up Uruz: strength, the wild ox. Opportunity disguised as loss, a way of life coming to an end. Really? A woman alone watches the fine, last light in the canyon, July evening after rain. A luminous clarity: greens vivid, sky soft greyed periwinkle. Getting better and better. Anywhere else she could ever be, wouldn't she be remembering this? |
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Issue #22/23, October, 2001 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.