water

[kagomeshuko.livejournal.com]

Thinking of Maria Theresa Broussard,
a Pregnant Girl in My Freshman Class
My First Semester in Louisiana

I am here at an end tip of things.
The Gulf curls in a few miles away,
and she comes to my office daily.
One is cautious of the weather here.
I’m told alligators are sleeping
in the mud just a few miles away.
I’m shown bottles of huge green pills
she takes for things I’ve forgotten.
Her mother and sisters are sad,
though the wisteria has been like
music this year, and the camellias
as tight as confectioners’ roses.
She tells me about the boy and how he . . .
Since I’ve been here I’ve bought chances
on nine church-sponsored raffles sold me
in front of Kroger’s on Saturdays.
Aphids are lush here, and I’ve learned
the proper proportions of poisons
and oilicides. And my wife’s garden
has sprung from the wet dirt like babies.
In my office she shows me pictures
she’s drawn: mice holding floppy flowers,
faceless children in antique bonnets.
She promises me a phoenix.
I smile and ask her how she’s doing.
She twists her arms and shows me she is
double jointed. A friend is giving her
a C.B. radio. “It will help,”
she tells me. There are large green palms here,
and I think of their white hearts, but we
no longer import them from Brazil,
or so the man at Kroger’s tells me.
“This is the end,” he tells me. And so
I take them all. And she smiles at me
Because it will help, and I ask her
what C.B. name she’ll take for herself.
“Sophisticated Lady,” she says.
She says, “Lots of people call me that.”
“That’s nice,” I say. She brought me three bells
for my window, and I hung them there.
I’ve not asked what she’ll name her child.
It will be born on her birthday,
she says. The Gulf curls in.
The wind has not moved the bells.

~ John Wood

I know all of you are probably getting tired of my posting poems by John Wood (are you?), but at our Honors College picnic on the lake, I just kept staring at water and I kept thinking of this poem. I had to post it.