Beloved

The sun has become a Scarlet Ibis ballooning
its great wings in flight until nothing remains
but the instant of its perfect form diving
over me and this lambent hill swarming with
tractor parts and a muddy swimming hole
behind a grey rooted barn of bleached red.  

There's a smell to a forgotten farm, dirt
chambers of blood-bone and marrow earth
tilled with the DNA of rusted secrets whose
umbra gnats of reminder skim the soil's surface.
A magpie wrangles its nest with a gingham
remnant of a quilt fragmented in dryness.

A little brown bat makes an entrance from
a loft window, decayed wood embedded in its
fingers, radar adept, throat agape with insects
raging against the dying of the light. I pack
my bag and want to take more than words from
this place, inhaling the solitude of its grave.

I lived here, I sowed and worked these fields
in the heat and canned the harvest. I rocked
my children on the porch and watched theirs
play in the fields. I felt them braid my hair with
flowers and saved their gifts of rocks and twigs
with quilts in a hope chest at the foot of my bed.

I buried my husband and then he buried me 'neath
that rotten stump of peach tree my great-grandfather
planted for his sweetheart. This is the legacy of
truth from ancestral blood lining our arteries blue
in remembrance: that we recognize beyond a doubt  
the beauty of the Beloved in none first but ourselves.  

~

Spring 2015