Pulling Up Beside My Husband at the Stoplight
We are going to the same place but we take two cars. Sunday morning and there’s not much traffic, so I pull up beside him at the stoplight. There he is, in his car, beside my car, the profile of his face in the window, the brown of his hair against his neck. He turns and blows me a kiss. I watch it float on by. . . . I ask for another. I remember then how he wakes me on the workday mornings, his boots across the carpet of the dark bedroom, the scent of his face when he locates me in the covers, kisses my eyebrow and the corner of my mouth, tells me the weather report and the precise time of day. So. . . I roll down my window, whistle in my throat, pull my glasses crooked on my face, do my best baboon snorting, pound the horn as if it were bread dough. There is only the lady in the white Buick, but he is embarrassed, glad to see the green. Me--I’m stepping on the gas, catching up, wondering what I can do at 56th and Calvert. |
The Sisters Play Canasta in a Snowstorm
The sister who can drive picks up the others, keeping the Pontiac chugging in each driveway while each sister steps out, pulling her door shut behind her, pulling on her new Christmas stocking mittens. We have no business out in such a storm, one says, laughing, no business at all. But the wind takes her words and swirls them like snow across the windshield. It’s on to the next house, the next sister. At the last house we play canasta, the deuces wild, even as they were in childhood, the wind blowing through the empty apple trees, through the shadows of bumper crops. They are kids again, planning a prank in a farmhouse while a salesman gets out of his car with a briefcase. Let’s drape a sheet over Margaret’s head-- Margaret will do it—our ghost bobbing and moaning in the doorway in broad daylight. We got rid of that one-- bring on the next one! We’re rascals sure as barnyard dogs--we’re wild card players. The snow thickens, the coffee perks, and nothing is lost if it can be retold. We’ll have to quit someday, one or the other says. We are getting up there in the years. We’ll have to quit someday, but today-- today-- deal, sister, deal! |
I Want to Say Sky
I want to say Sky and hold it like a huge blue bowl over us in the desert. I want to say Cactus and have night fall and a single head-light star show up between the arms of a saguaro. I want to say Dry and then Not Dry and have the Guadalupe Wash fill with blue water and empty again to show white sand and hundreds and thousands of blue blossoms like a narrow river through the dry places, fragrance from those flowers so very light as to be imaginary and you, real and I, real in a room with six windows, old soft couch, couch with faded floral print we sit upon and sink our bodies into and relax together, our cotton shirt lives opening, our gold foil wrapped lives, opening, opening. |
The One-Finger Wave
I say odd things like Hi Honey to Lake Superior when I round the bend on U.S. 61 and there she is. Hi Honey to millions of cubic feet of water and bedrock I greet celestial bodies like old friends. How you doin’ to the full moon. Good to see you again. A greeting between wayfarers, an interstice like the one-finger wave between ranchers on the roads through the sandhills of Nebraska. My car going north meets a truck loaded with angus going south. At the precise moment, the precise distance, windshield to windshield, my hands still on the wheel, I lift my index finger and the stranger does the same as if to say: in our most solitary orbits we are sometimes not alone. |
