Wife for Scale
       

This is a tender age—and in geologic time,
hardly an age at all. But a golden band

of rock, pressed paper-thin, will stand
for these years, a kind of scientific

shorthand. Once I had a professor
whose wife was in every photo he took

of rock formations. He'd click through
slide after slide, saying: My wife for scale.

Isn't there always a woman in the picture
and isn't she always small in comparison?

Forgive me: that was my grief talking.
Tell me: how do I teach myself to be alone?

The strata for this age will not be the first
to reveal what salt does to stone, as if

a sea had been here and not sadness only.
Tell me: with God a question, where

is solace but in the earth? The soil
I'm standing on in this moment—

even as it shifts beneath my feet, as it gives
and cannot hold me—will be rock.

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Copyright © 2021 Maggie Smith All rights reserved
from Southern Indiana Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission