Samsonite
If I get this vintage green suitcase, my life will change. I will be organized and my room will be quaint! Though it does have a musty smell, and small shards of slivered silvery glass. Tiny danger. Metal clasps.
I keep forgetting to live in the present. I push my shopping cart through the building that once held groceries, but is now a thrift shop. Look at all I could own, who I could become!
Aisles of possibility. Beauty in the racks. Shelves of books: a whole degree. Romance, Classics, Religion, Children’s Lit. Walk by the couple debating their first set of dishes. Pang of envy. Pass the no longer needed baby-clothes.
Take time. Sweep the glass, make only one drop of blood. Pull the newspaper out, crumpled carrier of scent and capture of yesterday. Sing as you fold summer clothes during winter. Yours, theirs. Live in both seasons.
The winter sun reflects bright snow. Curl of cat, fold of the suitcase that stays open until you latch its sharp edges closed.
The growing season
Sun continues, the bees move to the next flower, as strawberry plants unpetal into berries. Is there always a subtext, the thing beneath the thing? How the pistil
will come to hold pollen if opened properly. Fruit, indeterminate as the heirloom tomato I happened to taste at our Sunday Farmer’s Market.
Indeterminate: not known in advance, not leading to a definite end. Tomato plants will bloom, set fruit and ripen all at the same time. Do we, too, depend
on nature’s best deadline, winter’s first snow? Human fertility’s curse: that we know.
Planting cosmos
Promised a late-summer sunset orange, we clear winter from the driveway. Brittle leaves, small sticks, creeping weeds. My child is impatient to hold the seeds in her small hands. The baby sits in a leaf pile rustling her feet. As my daughter cups the sharp seeds in her confident palms, she asks for their name. “Cosmos,” I tell her. She asks, “Like the show, like the universe?” Some part of us came from the stars, long ago. How long? To this girl, her four years are immense. “Even before you were born,” I say. We count months. I can see it now. The baby will be walking by the time these plants are in bud. And my father will probably have died.
We live in small time, now. A season contains as much history as we can imagine. A week blooms full of possibility. An hour may hold heartbreak and joy on either end. Gather water and be generous.
The sun is shining and the earth warms.
Lara Payne lives in Maryland, USA. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, and throughout the area. She was a Goldwater fellow at NYU and has been a resident of the VCCA. She has had poems in many magazines, online and in print, most recently on One Art and Elysium. Her poems have appeared on public transit and in a museum exhibit on the Chesapeake.