David-02-14-17.jpg
February 9, 2018
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2000 x 2000 px
Random Text
Qué Será, SeráShe doesn’t mind the time he spends
in the domino hall downtown, silent
staccato of light and shadow radiating
from fanblades overhead. She listens
to the whir of her Singer, watches
the shimmering needle stitch up yards
of satin the color of ripe plums, muted
voices from “Our Gal Sunday,” its serial quest
for happiness reaching her against
the open-window backdrop of sparrows
in the hackberries, a cow nuzzling
chainlink at the gatepost, honeymoon memory
of blackberry wine on her lips, cool sea breezes
on the balcony of the Casa Ricardo, though beer
is the beverage she shares with Elwood late
afternoons beneath the chinaberry trees out back,
good solid German beer, foam cascading
icy bottles like surf flung up an English cliff
in a poem she memorized in high school, struck
by an emptiness she knew but could not name,
sunless-February counterpoint to a feathered hat,
a pair of patent leather ankle-strap heels
in the window at Lichtenstein’s. She walked
right in and tried them on, risked Elwood’s gloom
and brought them home. This afternoon, while he
plays dominoes in town, she sews a dress for herself,
hums fragments of a Doris Day song from the movie
they saw last week at the Rialto, a voice to match
the open landscape outside her windows: cottonfields
ripening all the way to the creek, thunderheads dark
in the distance, and the sheen of late-afternoon light
against satin rippling toward her Singer’s needle.
Southern Poetry Review, Spring/Summer 2004
A Note About The Poem:
Between June 1947 and October 1952, between ages 19 and 24, my mother gave birth to four children. She raised us on an isolated farm without many of the amenities. Until 1957, there were no indoor toilet facilities, no hot running water, in our house. Phone service came in the mid-Sixties. And it was a working farm. Always—ALWAYS—there was work to be done.
When I sat town to write this poem, I tried to imagine the rare afternoon when Mother had the house to herself, when she could breathe without noise and disruption.