Читать книгу Planted by the Signs - Misty Skaggs - Страница 16

Oatmeal Cookie Communion

The layered skirttail

brushing my plump, pink,

baby cheek

is plaid.

Skinny strips of harvest orange

and goldenrod yellow

pen in blocks of pea green.

The geometric fields and fences

are flip-flopped.

Planted beneath a swirl of paisley sea.

A housedress,

with every imaginable

blue hue

worn thin with age,

soft and semi-see-through.

The loose skin of the leg

shielded by the layers of cloth

is the same.

Translucent and shimmering

like a clean, cotton sheet

in the spring sunlight

on the clothesline strung

between maple trees out back.

There’s a thick, curvy, muscled calf

built up by farming

family bottomland,

tenderized by age and hard work,

and finally gone to seed.

Somewhere above the skirt

and the housecoat

and the apron

and the swirl of color and texture—

somewhere far above the vines

of defined veins easy to trace

with a four-year-old fingertip—

there was a woman.

A tender woman

and a tender, twangy voice

drifting down to me.

Somewhere up there

there were watery blue eyes

and thick plastic glasses

with even thicker lenses.

And a loose white bun

hovered above those

with strands as thin and delicate

as spider silk, escaping

to brush across her wrinkled face.

I stand to receive the homemade

oatmeal cookie communion

she hands down to me.

Her pockets fill my vision and run over.

Slips of paper scribbled

with old-fashioned names

like Vangeline

and Isolene

and Iva

and Lovel.

Horehound candy and sticky peppermints,

white tufts of tissue paper

and the crinkly, plastic wrapper

protecting a plug of King B.

Her face is blurry

in my young memory

but her kitchen is as clear

as the strange shadows

on faded linoleum.

Shadows I liked to watch dance

as I slid across the room

dragging my butt over bumps

and sinkholes settled

into the floor

of an old house in Soldier.