Awaiting Results Turns of a Phrase
Partridge, Dixie
Awaiting Results The daymoon rising is an old oyster shelly some bluff against time. Nothing up close holds me, and its blanched shape hardens until only the body feels true, malignancies...
...Like tentative plots they twist off on their own, affecting outcomes...
...Nothing up close holds me, and its blanched shape hardens until only the body feels true, malignancies forming from elsewhere...
...yet because my sister wrote of killing them, stomping their nests, 1 imagine egg yolk smeared on my shoes, a shudder as I walked back past the barn where old alfalfa smelled of decay...
...Finding the bed made after breakfast, I excuse myself for not recalling having done it earlier: other things to think of—smears on glass slides, shadows against bone in the darkroom of X-ray...
...What might be preventable becomes less clear, while things that never really happened flourish like a crop of dreams out of what the mind chooses to keep...
...These days, books that have meant much turn their backs on shelves, their story-lines mulch into gibberish...
...until as with all memory, in trusting a thing not completely to be trusted, light slants off the glass, dawn hits twice and I walk between...
...There must be sense to make after decades of what sprouts out from events that didn't occur...
...And 1 wrote down long ago the black and white texts of magpie feathers, replenished perfect after each year's molting...
...How I got that clear vision 1 don't recall: she's there, pale-skinned in her white dress, straight-backed, small, intent and without smile, eyes that both give back and hold back...
...Turns of a Phrase Recalling Lines from Dickinson This time of year when the slant of light draws birds toward our east panes, when feathers cling to glass and the occasional dazed sparrow flies off again, I think of Emily...
...These days before first light I wonder if f'll reach the place where I needn't write again and again of my father, needn't feel for some part of a past waiting to be heightened, re-discovered in its manifold shapes...
...Grown, I still heard sounds on the roof of animals in from the hills...
...At evening, the sinking moon enlarges to a curved screen playing my lives back, and after dark the hay mower is still shearing down days like timothy grass...
...Dixie Partridge Commonweal 18 April 23,1999...
...The deep brocades of memory include what's forgotten, and I move toward it...
...The clearest image of my father's dying remains the soft whiteness of his arms in the hospital gown—skin more translucent than an infant's—after long sleeves worn through decades of farming...
...Long ago, I imagined living in a basement house like my cousins— clear-booted visions of feet moving past the mind's high windows, dread of what approaches seeping through walls like illness...
...To the end, he never had trouble sleeping...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 8
