Another Creature: Poems

At Ragdale

At Ragdale Once I asked myself, when was I happy? I was looking at a February sky. When did the light hold me and I didn’t struggle? —Deborah Digges, “Broom” One morning in summer I lay—red ball tip of a pushpin, tiny rise of texture, blip on the screen of the world—under two hundred years of elm, on a moth-gnawed blanket dragged down a wooded path, and slept in open air, with my books and my apples and cheese and all good intentions. Overhead in the branches, black squirrels shook their tails and chitted their complaints; black crows cocked their satin heads, while behind me a garden shot purple with hollyhocks opened to prairie splashed with orange with lilies. Beyond that prairie a river poured cool and a fox flicked her bright tail and drank, and beyond her the city of Chicago cast its great shadow over my parents’ yellow house, my mother bent over her crossword books, my father with his bowl of peanuts, his long yellow pads lined with history, and beyond them my husband, feeding his cats and kissing 81 his ten thousand worries hello. And when the sunlight passed itself down limb to limb, and found me there dozing, I did not roll out of the light or cover my eyes. 82 ...