Self-Portrait in Downtown Missoula
       

Three Travelers recline on the corner
in late-August smoke. They're like the sun,
these men with brick-colored skin
and dreaded hair—don't look directly
at them. Their two dogs quiver on one
tattered rope, all head, a pair of deadly
tadpoles. In a mercurochrome glaze,
the sun looks more like Mars, the grass
a desiccated russet. Over the mountain,
retardant streams from a plane in a sudden
red gush. The night my husband drove us
off a cliff, eighty feet down to the ice
at the edge of the river, I went up
on a body board, clinging to a boy
my husband flagged down on the highway.
The nurse kept asking if I knew Madeline DeFrees—
the nun who became a poet. So long ago,
that haze of morphine, my x-ray glowing
on the wall, shoulder splintered like a spring
tree under snow. When the doctor asked
what I wanted to use my arm for,
I couldn't imagine my body other than
an immaculate wholeness I had lost.
On the curb at the men's feet, a box
of doughnuts sits open, studded with flies.
Maybe they're selling them, or someone
gave them a sweetness they refused.
So long ago, my own renunciation.
I was a nun too then, in my way.

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Copyright © 2021 Henrietta Goodman All rights reserved
from Iron Horse Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission