Her Old Days

Given hair a younger blonde, she describes her old days

on the farm, hours to imagine happy heifers, minutes to 

remember if one can agree to forget memory’s conspiracy:

a fence stitched round her lips, winding guardrail of wrinkles.

I touch her hand, misunderstand the glacier look for ice

and meltable artifacts. She laughs at my efforts to warm

her. The past is simple as boiling huckleberries for jam.

What’s simple consumes time and patience.  

She says Lester had an affair with summer, or one season’s

apprentice cowhand. What bound left no marks on the able

hands. And what can I say except maybe: what happened?

Oh, she says, you know how things go down red dirt road

in the backwoods of Alabama, the heart is thorn-clotted 

underbrush. A reprieve of kudzu. Turns out their first wedding

didn’t quite take. She forgave Lester anyway that year 

the cotton grew a record harvest, blessing enough to renew

their vows in a Greek Orthodox Church near Mobile Bay.

She wore the same crown from her old days, a wiser home

coming queen luring us to begin again. That first place.

The house near the meadow, skirts tumbled by breeze.

This time is forever, her mouth closes a drawstring purse, 

the top shut tight, the bottom bigger than one imagines, a

hollow core. All the gold in the world— all our gilded awning

— but a planet has no floor. And dread is an event’s horizon.