Her Mistake
       

When cinders showed up in her blouses,
cacti in her platelets, siroccos inside
her compact mirror, when she started to read
with the little white eyes of old potatoes,
and speak in basso profundo—distant
and godlike—as if through a sewage pipe,
she knew the time had come.
Like the finch, she did her knitting in
corners, like the squirrel got very drunk
on hoarding for bleaker seasons.
She fangled a cap of colored wools
to ward off snowy absence, and buried,
with paws bark-sharpened, cherished gauds—
by the sweet-gum tree his laugh, nose
by the climbing rose. When she found
on her fork a clump of dirt and nearly
gulped it, when a reconditioned mattress
and box spring floated in a casket
down a river of dream, she was certain
they'd dissolve by September's end.
Her mistake. They stuck it out
an extra month, then she helped him
pack, load up boxes, and they watched
the diggers in gray, one last time
out the kitchen window, stock up for a winter
predicted to freeze the blood.

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Copyright © 2014 Gregory Fraser All rights reserved
from Designed for Flight
TriQuarterly Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission