Pastoral without Fairies in the Hawthorn
- Pastoral without Fairies in the Hawthorn
I am too near to it, even here, even in the headacheof bees in the hedgerows banishing the long darkof your lungs, the ugly magenta of your afflictedheart, your body a fever of unlived futures. I thinkI could have hurt you back if I loved you enough,but I kept quiet, already bruised pink as a solstice,a spell of shrapnel and pollen. Bone roses weeptheir liberal praise as I photograph bouquets atyour first funeral. The cheap resilience of hymns.A heaven emptied of fire alarms. I didn’t knowwhat it felt like to miss someone until years afteryou died, and then the pitiless decade pulled loafafter loaf of rain from me. Happiness is not a curebut an ending. Clover purples the drought. My hipswide as a choir of winter butterflies. No one visitsand your ghost wonders why. Why the toadstoolring stops longing for the changelings, mothersthe empty circumference instead. It is the singing. [End Page 111]
Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press), Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W. W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Poetry. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.
