Song
       

At any given time she only owned
one sturdy bra. After awhile white rubber threads
escaped the cotton shell, and the shoulder straps

curled in delicate scallops over her shoulder.
She bowed to settle her breasts into the cups.
Her father, a preacher who believed

in the virtue of thrift, allowed one square
of toilet tissue, three, if necessary. His pencils,
she told us many times-as if, though he died

when she was young, she still could not believe—
he arranged by size, each sharp as the poison of certainty.
From the alley on winter school-day afternoons

in the cold and hoary dark I watched her
in the haloed light of the stove's hood.
I could see her contentment

or her anger in how she bent to her task. She'd
woven a nest of silence and dark around herself.
I wanted to enter it a pilgrim but did not know how.

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Copyright © 2018 Athena Kildegaard All rights reserved
from Course
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Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission