from One Day

Dawn Potter

 

6 a.m. 

 

I’ve been up since five, stacking clean dishes,

carrying coffee to Tom, who is climbing into his

Carhartts and work boots, who is making his lunch,

who is gathering his tools, as I lug his filthy yesterday

shirts down to the washing machine, sweep his yesterday

sawdust up from the kitchen floor. Six a.m.

is work time: I step outside into the slant light

 

of summer morning, laden with laundry, my brain

ticking over what I need to do before I can allow myself

to sit down and write this poem . . . water the new

beans sprouting up beneath the trellis, scrub

last night’s soup off the stovetop, pick the last

few peas before sun swells them into starch . . .

The poem that I am not writing also swells, but, words:

 

please, murmur in your crib a moment longer.

Across the neighbor’s fence a dogwood tree flaunts

her bridal joy. I pin up the socks and underwear

and consider the depredations of groundhogs.

And now here comes the poem I am not writing, staggering

across the damp grass. The poem is biting off the carrot

tops and parsley leaves. The poem is scratching up

 

all of the bluebells I planted last fall. The kitchen floor

is as clean as my face, the tomato plants are shooting

toward heaven like Jack’s beanstalk, and the poem is fidgeting

in this still air that smells faintly of salt, in this sea-brine

early morning. She is wiping her nose on my apron,

she is stretching her arms to me, begging me to lift her up,

to kiss her wet fat face.

[first published as "First of July" in Vox Populi; forthcoming in Calendar]