To Hear What We’ve Come for This Long Time
One time and place nourishes the next, just like your broken eggshells feed your garden.
STILL LIFE: DOG ON GRANDMOTHER RUG
Mornings rumpled or askew, I know
where he sleeps, sniffing the same suppers
that once filled my head and direction,
on my grandmother’s humble kitchen rug
woven like the schoolgirl potholders
I strung on a metal frame. Edges ragged,
I tuck trailing threads underneath to keep
the picture whole: her house, humble
and ragged at the edges, walls stale
with grease and grounds, bloom
of Martha White on the Hoosier board,
wedding rings caked in dough. I went
thieving through that house after her mind
then her body left town—taking small
things of no account to others, my divine
rights of childhood, like this little striped rug
I rolled into quilts her mother pieced
from old shirts. I know where he sleeps
and twitches in dreams of unleashed runs,
this rainbowed mat stamped with her boxy
shoes. Evenings she crumbled leftover
cornbread in buttermilk for my grandfather,
diminished in drunken renown, whose daughters
said leave him, leave him. She stirred on
and on, stitched into memory’s still life,
knowing no other warp or weft but the verses
she quoted for his salvation. I know one
world and time bleeds into another
in my kitchen of tile and granite and warm
hardwoods, where my aging dog circles
and settles down, where her steps come
and go in the night.
THE ONLY EGGSHELLS I WALK ON ARE IN THE GARDEN
Away those tender feelings, heart worn
on the sleeve, that crybaby lip fixing to get
stepped on—the only eggshells I walk on
are in the garden. Tossed in the leeks,
crumbled at the base of tomatoes, stirred
with acid of coffee and Epsom, summer
soil’s eggy balm. Gone the dark clouds
of mother and men—earth yields underfoot,
bears my whole gravity without complaint.
Shells collect in the sink: pale opalescence
in each oval, the ragged cup itself, chalice
that feeds without end. No more the sulled-up
herness and hisness cutting my heels,
the swallowed-down wince—the only spears,
spring asparagus for the taking and the tongue.
I crack open my rise and shine, crushing
what can only be morning’s sun unyoked
in my palm that I lick and lick again, sated.
LEAN CLOSER
Time and time, uncountable times
vacuuming the dining room, the gravity
of table and chair legs pressed like hoofprints
in the rug—dog hair, petal and leaf, crumbs
of constant hunger whooshed until one day
something clattered and spun out—
a tiny battery I must have dropped snapping it
into my father’s hearing aids, or my husband
fumbling with his. A zinc-air battery
needing oxygen to awaken and amplify
the world’s yaw and pitch. Before my father
began tearing the aids apart in his dementia
(something foreign, something else unraveling),
I replaced the batteries myself. Both father
and husband now passed into that bright bell
where sound is reborn. I lean in to hear
what they’re saying. Are they still here,
still hearing how I spin my days, how I
bronze into fall, blush into May? They call
to me, the dead I walk among, whisper
remember, remember in the lifting fog.
I lean closer to their good ear, telling
my comings and goings like sweet nothings.
Isn’t everything a noise of treble and bass
until we leave deafness behind in the tinny
distance, to hear what we’ve come for
this long time, a voice in the night
that says my darling like no other could.
About the author
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor of Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems and prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.
- Linda Parsonshttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/linda-parsons/
