ISSUE: Fall 2022
Bow to the peaches heavy and timeless, wrapped in sheets of cool.
I go here for you, among the frozen storehouses, the berries and potpies.
Grandmother, Grandfather, you couldn’t walk here if you tried.
I will feed you. I will bring you salt. I will stuff the cart.
There were warm days at the bottom of the hill. A deer bounded
between us. I stood a little farther back. Do you remember the hyacinth
in the second season? Grandmother, this is your favored time. The world: delicate.
The deck is rotting beneath our feet. Grandfather, I promise
for all the life we have left, I will not step on its boards. Your mind is a siren
for all things. All breezes too steady. What is it like, keeper—
one boot pushing through a mess of stars but your flannel shirt
here in the summer grass cooling as the first hurricane touches the continent?
Let’s chop up watermelon in the driveway. I’ll run blazes through
the pastry tables, buy that waxy cheese you love, the frozen peas,
honey-ham slices in a box. Let’s slather mayo on white bread, suspend maraschinos
in pink Jell-O and in cakes bubbled gold, handwash the Tupperware
in the quiet night settling into the house’s slipshod foundation:
reat jubilation, great triumph—here on the incarnational side of things
you can never get enough.
