Poetry
Partridge, Dixie
Dixie Partridge Field Pond We knew as the pond knew, our spot of earth given, any drought unfathomed. In the attic during rains we dressed in feathered hats and turned the cracked pages of books...
...As we return through years, our father points out the hollow that held the pond, as if by some miracle it might come back...
...We helped in hayfields grown more sunburned every year, irrigation streams never enough, our sweltering faces separate against the empty sky...
...slack dresses and feathered hats...
...We snailed into sleep like Hummel children, antiqued by what the attic held and the rains recited on windows...
...Hollow walls reached into rafters where clothes in trunks smelled of immigrant darkness, and all the same colors-browns and newsprint beige, limp as the strange ringlet of hair pressed in a book...
...I abandoned games and hiding places, began to use the attic for storage of what could be set aside...
...He had taken us wading when we could barely stand, was distressed we couldn't remember...
...The drought that took it never passed, and my dreams still turn into watery windows, solemn rehearsals in long, slack dresses and feathered hats...
...In the attic during rains we dressed in feathered hats and turned the cracked pages of books from Sweden...
...When we were old enough to walk the farm by ourselves, the field pond had vanished, and we forgot it, though Dad always spoke of it, how plentiful the land seemed then...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 16
