Pomegranate Girl

My mother calls for me and the corn falls down.
          My husband presses me to his dark face, his hot

mouth. I am eating the blood seeds
          because I want to. So much

is different for me now. My mouth
          burns from knowing what it didn't before.

I wonder now at the shape of geese flying,
          that warlike wedge. Back and forth. Will they

never land? I hear balloons cracking; a door slams. Another
          bird has something to sing about. They say

darkness has its own illumination. I see nothing
          I don't want to see, and a great deal more.

I see the eye turned—so—there is always enough
          light to see that. I see air moving across

the table, and the chair all unperturbed.
          When I close my eyes, I see

a window, open. I want to know how
          it all came about—this being lost and

looked for and not found. One minute
          gathering red flowers on a hill, the next

plunging straight down, my hair hanging above me
          as the blue sky snapped shut and my feet hit granite.

Now I want nothing, or nothing more
          than a cool wind. Or a flat stone by a river, tinged

with moss, the pungent mud pocked with flies and me
          waist high in the razor grass watching the cranes, so white,

as they fall to ground. Down
          here the earth is in constant

complaint. There is no moment here
          which does not have its say. But

I feel settled. What's done is done.
          My husband has his work, as I have mine.

We speak, or not. I pretend to
          pour tea, hot rivulets. I reach to touch

the luminous scar at the top of my world.
          If he regrets his choice, he does not say.

Copyright © 2002 Patricia Hill All rights reserved
from Kalliope
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission