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The Red Thread

The Red Thread Pennies, chocolates wrapped in foil. For this, each house has emptied into cars, and the cars half-emptied while the men look for parking, and the women, small children attached like pockets, cross the street. Everyone wants her child to win. It must be about how far they swam, tails like the turn of a fish hook, fighting the blood in the body of the mother. How the women too stood up quickly afterward, sweeping off the curious hairs, and peed, and washed, because they heard it did something, was better than drugs or taking in Coke. I watched you swim then sink in the shower drain. Some part of you lingered, caught. It looked enough like a thread that I left it. Say something, say something about this thread. Something like: the vein from a leaf has blown in our wake. A red snake coils at the bottom of the drain: our child, phrased like a question.The plum tree in back ruptured in blight. Still, I could say nothing. -65- Some father is holding his girl up now so she seems to be at the top of the crowd, all fathers and daughters, Easter baskets and hands pushing against the park place fence as if that will make it open faster. The links of the fence are silver and shaped. Her coat is pink, puffy as a bruise. Winter has not touched her. Or rather, it has, in her braids and in her boots, in the way she scans and scans and seems to see everything -66- ...