Umbrage
Drat!
I thought I had got rid of this, but here
it is in my pocket, a small
sticky ball,
this inert, charred bolus
of fetid emotions, unsightly feeling
of being affronted.
Some days, just in case,
I used to take it with me, but tight-zipped.
Snapped. Furled.
And then, I really thought I had dropped it,
just let it go. But
it turns out
NO!
Leslie Schultz
Tour
for Estelle Uleberg Swanson
Not so long ago, I heard her tell
the story. We were at her kitchen table
in the old farmhouse near Madelia.
Was she making bread? Just Estelle,
her daughter, Julia, and me. And Maggie,
the black dog, on the wooden floor.
Maybe I had mentioned my teen-age tale,
the thrill of climbing the Tour Eiffel,
then gazing out over the rainy rooftops
of Paris? Estelle kept kneading the flour,
then gestured out the window. “When
I was three, I climbed to the top
of the windmill,” she said, dividing
the dough into loaves of bread,
patting them into their metal pans.
She was playing. Her father had turned
away, then turned back, saw her, hand
over hand, ascending the steel
frame of the high Aermotor.
He followed, without a sound, fearful
she would turn around, panic. Oh, if she fell,
like a falling star!
But her gaze was far
off over the flat cornfields,
watching the grey sky shift,
form a rainbow, shimmer
like ribbons, over the blue silo.
She barely noticed her father’s arms
or felt her feet touch the safe ground.
Leslie Schultz
Still
for Tim
We met one April evening long ago.
I make a count of fifteen thousand days....
Could I have known then what now I know,
that I’d still be enchanted by your ways
decades and decades on? How can that be?
We’ve made a daughter, a garden, a home.
Our shared life is now my reality
too large to distill for one small poem.
We’ve learned how to dance in our garden rows,
singing the songs that make our heads spin—
eyes on the stars, perhaps stepping on toes,
and still laughing despite the pain and the woes.
Our love is deep-planted and here to stay,
so I can still whisper, “Love? Let’s sail away.”
Leslie Schultz
Could there be a more appropriate time for a love poem than in April? While Tim and I celebrate our wedding anniversary in early August, we met when I was a freshman in college and he was a graduate student on a balmy April evening. Last night, we were talking about what a turning point that was for us–Fate? Destiny? Karma? Just plain luck? Hard to say, but I know I am profoundly grateful that we did meet in this lifetime. I can think of no better companion.
These days of sheltering in place have, if anything, thrown that insight of good fortune into even higher relief for me. Sequesterd with anyone else, I might well be climbing the walls! Instead we are busy building cold frames for vegetables; planning rabbit-proof fences for the garden; toasting the brilliant stellium of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars; watching episodes of The Great Tours of France and nibbling Brie; exploring the muddy back roads between Northfield and the Mississippi River; and dreaming of booking an afternoon’s sail on the Schooner Hjordis out of Grand Marais.
Tim and I will both welcome the cessation of these current restrictions, but still, slowing down to focus on essentials has been instructive. I can’t imagine a foxhole that is more like a Hobbit hole–good humor, good books, good food, good company–and that is all due to him.
Thanks, Tim!
Rhinestones I think she was spooning custard into my bowl, Grandma Phyllis, when I asked her about the owl pinned to her dress. “Are those rubies?” I wondered. The eyes of the tiny bejeweled bird caught the light, glowed as bright as the coffee percolator’s red spot. She fiddled with Saran wrap. I didn’t think she’d heard. “Oh, this?” She tapped the tip of her red-enameled nail on the owl’s breast. Metal plumage rattled like hail had, the night before, on asphalt shingles over my bed. “No. Just paste.” I thought of the white goo at school, how all the girls made it into fake fingernails, would wave their hands like movie stars, fling invisible feather boas over their shoulders, call each other “Dar-link!” Grandma, whose hair glinted high over her pink scalp, showed me the worn gold bands on her left hand, sprinkled with clouded stones pressed like raisins into dough, hazy with lemon oil and cold cream. “These, though,” she smiled, “are real,” and lit a cigarette. “Understand?” Leslie Schultz
Who defines what is real? Who determines value? Does the surface reveal or conceal?
Questions with no fixed answers….