a woman at the sink:
how do they see
when glass divides the wild?
Unblinking, so as not to scare,
she watches them mend
with twigs and hair last year's
nest on the windowsill,
cupped like a hand.
They see her too,
as musical shade in her own light,
fluid as vines nearing spring.
She hears the woe
of God rolled in their throats,
a monk's chant,
what she knows as a creaking
when she puts away in trunks
the clothes grown small,
or a rubbing when she dries
the blue Bavarian plate
given her mother and father
at the wedding which began
the long breaking.
Washing the last fork
she feels the stab of children gone
upstairs, the father's absence,
the gray unease of twilight,
what to do with time
the fear of someone crouched in the basement
fingering the scar on his neck like a pearl
as he waits for her door to shut.
How, after that, could she ever pour tea?
How, when her father left, did she button her coat?
She will say that grace comes hard:
the sweeping of crumbs,
the dark against the pane
like an eye boring spring into
the withered, the numb, the lame.
(c)Suzanne Underwood Rhodes 1999
from What A Light Thing, This Stone
Sow's Ear Press, Abingdon, VA
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