Through the window
screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that
spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down.
I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that
vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
that waits like the
lobed sassafras leaf just before
its dark green turns
into red, that waits
like the honeybee in
the mouth of the purple lobelia.
While I wait, I can
hear the random clink of one fork
against a plate. The
woman next door is eating supper
alone. She is sixty,
perhaps, and for many years
has eaten by herself
the tomatoes, the corn
and okra that she
grows in her backyard garden.
Her small metallic
sound persists, as quiet almost
as the windless
silence, persists like the steady
random click of a
redbird cracking a few
more seeds before the
sun gets too low.
She does not hurry,
she does not linger.
Her younger neighbors
think that she is lonely.
But I know what sufficiency
she may possess.
I know what can be
gathered from year to year,
gathered from what is
near to hand, as I do
elderberries that
bend in damp thickets by the road,
gathered and
preserved, jars and jars shining
in rows of claret
red, made at times with help,
a friend or a lover,
but consumed long after,
long after they are
gone and I sit
alone at the kitchen
table.
And when I sit in the
last heat of Sunday, afternoons
on the porch steps in
the acid breath of the boxwoods,
I also know
desolation. The week is over, the coming night
will not lift. I am
exhausted from making each day.
My family, my
children live in other states,
the women I love in
other towns. I would rather be here
than with them in the
old ways, but when all that’s left
of the sunset is the
red reflection underneath the clouds,
when I get up and
come in to fix supper,
in the darkened
kitchen I am often lonely for them.
In the morning and
the evening we are by ourselves,
the woman next door
and I. Still, we persist.
I open the drawer to
get out the silverware.
She goes to her
garden to pull weeds and pick
the crookneck squash
that turn yellow with late summer.
I walk down to the
pond in the morning to watch
and wait for the blue
heron who comes at first light
to feed on minnows
that swim through her shadow in the water.
She stays until the
day grows so bright
that she cannot
endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.
She bows her wings
and slowly lifts into flight,
grey and slate blue
against a paler sky.
I know she will come
back. I see the light create
a russet curve of
land on the farther bank,
where the wild rice
bends heavy and ripe
under the first
blackbirds. I know
she will come back. I
see the light curve
in the fall and rise
of her wing.
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