She died in her sleep,
a good way to go they say.
And outside, beneath a waning moon,
a white crane slid his glossy bill
into the silt of the irrigation ditch.
Fields bound her yellow house.
Irrigation brought the cranes.
She let migrants till
the broccoli, chard and artichoke.
And in the morning the workers could not stop
themselves from moving their necks toward the window.
The movement caught their eye,
the curtain blowing out and up above the sill.
The dead crane by the ditch, still
and white as the center of her palms,
and the smell from her house, of dying lilac.
The smell of a bruise.
They say she died in her sleep.
But the workers know,
she took the life of that crane
and flew off with moon.
SOPHIA
She is wizened and purple-bruised with time.
She laughs,
at everything she doesn't understand.
Leather hands, steady as drumbeats,
strip the sheets of vacationers.
Their beds are filled with lice
which have fallen
through plaster in the beamed roof
where baby birds sleep in nests in the attic.
She shakes out blankets
of foreigners dust.
By her white bed she keeps a drawing of Aristaeus, god of
beekeeping,
and olive-growing. The god
who sent forty days of cooling winds in the summer. The only
woman he loved, died.
Bit in the heel by a jeweled serpent.
Her eyes are the color of fig leaves.
She watches bikini-clad tourists
tanning in the chicken yard
where she is trying to kill a rabbit.
She rubs the blackened bottoms
of copper pots.
And when they have gone to bed,
she steals away
through the blue olive groves
to an abandoned cemetery,
where a man she once loved
lies entombed
near an adder's nest.
On the farm I watched
you swing. The axe rang
true as consequence
with the dark pitchwood grain.
Blinking as you did,
I thought perhaps it startled you,
the chopping, the split-crack
throwing your arm askew,
so that a piece flew,
knocking against your shin.
"They shouldn't fall to the earth that way,"
I heard you tell the morning.
And you were right.
Your axe rang true,
true against the knotted core,
a kind of fist curled in on itself.
With set jaw, you split the stubborn piece to kindling, without a blink.
Morning gone, and I watched
again, the light from the hills
in between slats of barn spill
across your knees as you milked.
It was your cheek, resting
in that place,
the softest crease of thigh and belly round with spring's new grass.
Speaking, unheard to me from where I stood,
a few words of stay, or peace
to keep her still.
We are the same,
you and I.
We like the heat of a cow's belly,
reminding us of our mothers milk,
although we can not recollect taste,
the smell, it is something
part of us still.
We like the feel of calf skin.
It uses every part of us to touch.
I will go to you
and with my eyes on yours
they will say,
This is the way it should fall
on us, this heaviness of time.
This is the way we should fall to the earth.
You and I.
Kimberly's website is located at www.ksnow.com
Kimberly Snow was born in Brazil, in 1966, and grew up in the US and Germany, where she traveled extensively throughout Europe. She received her degree in English and Literature from Linfield College, Oregon, and currently resides in the Port Townsend. Her award winning poetry has appeared in numerous publications.
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