Everlasting Blue
How do you answer poverty, doubt, and worries about your kids? With the scent of sweet briar, the realness of animals, and a bridge in the dark.
ROSA RUBIGINOSA
Meaning is what you get when you have no money.
When you can’t afford a pedicure or an orchid,
the scent of sweet briar, clusters of pale pink petals,
blows over the lake, reminding you of freedom
and berries ripening in the June woods. Faded
petals with brown edges stick to worn canvas shoes
hiding your callused heels. A red-headed woodpecker
startles you, flying through the branches. Aglow
with limitation, your eyes fill with prayer
as the bird, a single berry in its beak, spreads its wings.
THE BRIDGE
On a bend in the road
just before it widened to cross
the bridge over the Holston’s rushing water,
a man stepped in front of my car
in the early January evening, flagged me
down and said the hardest words:
help me. In the middle of the road
his emergency lights flashed.
“Diesel,” he said, his English blurred.
In the glare of flashing tail lights,
I couldn’t see his face. His voice
reached across the roar
of the current. Window rolled down
I hesitated to open the door, imagining
all that would follow:
while my six-year-old daughter
waited an hour after the daycare closed
in the town where we knew no one,
me driving thirty minutes at night,
perhaps finding a pay phone and a tow truck
and then more waiting
on the almost invisible bridge
over the river in the dark.
EVERLASTING
My eyeI’m not a healer, though maybe I am.—Linda Parsons
My eyes search for what I can’t doubt,
the little black dog snoring on the couch,
the fluff of his feathered forelegs spread out
in geometric shapes of fur, the huff
of an angry mockingbird outside,
claiming the apple tree from the crows,
the light of morning coming through the blue window.
I seek the real, in both word and stone,
quartz and sage, hymn and tone. The small
comfort of standing shoulder to shoulder
with the believers spinning the ancient language,
of ritual, the mother tongue
of breath necessary, unstoppable
as light falling over the glossy coat of the chestnut mare
leaning her withers into me for a scratch.
Faith loves the hoof,
the ordinary hands caressing the ribs,
the shining fur of memory, the two ton
horse galloping across a field last month
buried by a backhoe. I believe the earth
depends on us. I believe her foals
will spring from everlasting blue.
Katherine Smith’s poetry has recently appeared in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Missouri Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her third book, Secret City, appeared with Madville Press in August 2022. A Tennessee native, she works at Montgomery College in Maryland.