Painted Shut
by
Ellen Waterston
Here life is meted out in sections. Farm
machinery parked arrow straight. Coming
or going takes right angles. All those tidy,
yellow-bright rows of weed-free annuals. Even
the unimportant knick knack– meticulous
on your mother’s white sill, long painted
shut. She excises crusts from triangular
sandwiches, pays the neighbor girl a penny
for every dead housefly dropped into the bean-
bag ashtray -- while you, the good son, plow under
miles of dried cornstalks and all thoughts of ever
doing anything else. And I, your wife, sit and crack
snap peas on the porch swing and dream…
of circles. Here, only the curlicuing rivers confound
the grid. Well, too, at the county fair, the round
trip of the Ferris wheel briefly haloed your face,
softened your rigid jaw. More time has passed.
I can tell because it begins to weigh something.
I smell it like the rain. The years fill my gauge
with a lightness. Some other gravity pulls me
away. For you words are roadblocks. But they
are how I travel. Get off your plow. Talk to me.
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