You Find Me Sad and Offer Me the Natural World, in Portraiture, for Comfort.  As Usual, My Observations Disappoint You.

There is a path that narrows through the painted woods and leads nowhere and ends in thicket, in the darkness where the forest meets the picture frame.

The flowering bush sun-speckled and two tree trunks that are singular in bareness and in being intertwined.  Meaning, I think: We must endure a kind of leaflessness in places where we choose to bend.

He had a mountain too, and I lived awhile in the shadow of that, not with the lavender but with the flies that grew fat and were happy in the summer when the smell of blood rose from the nearby abattoir like scented mist rising at dawn above the Sainte Victoire.

In the winter we grew cold, the flies and I, our bodies thinning and our breathing labored.  I kept milk and cheese out in the window box; they never perished.  Nor could I, the window being heavy – hard to open – and so close to ground.

These days I check the windows first and often for the possibility of flight.  Low down they offer nothing that I need.  Here are the memories you asked about: the smell of blood, the sound of flies buzzing.  That most particular of lullabies.

Laura Goldin is a publishing lawyer in New York. She has studied with Hermine Meinhard, Elaine Equi, Jim Moore, and Mary Stewart Hammond, and  her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Driftwood, and Right Hand Pointing, among other publications. 

A Song for Laura