Amaryllis,
Having been a farmer's daughter, she
didn't want to be a farmer's wife,
didn't want the smell of ripe manure in all his clothes,
the corresponding floors in her kitchen,
a pail of slop below the sink, a crate of baby
chicks beside the stove, piping beneath their bare light bulb,
cows calling at the gate for him to come,
cows standing in the chute as he crops
their horns with his long sharp shears.
So she nagged him toward a job in town,
so she sprang from the table weeping when he swore,
so after supper she sulks over her mending
as he unfolds his pearl pocket knife
to trim a callus on his palm.
Too much like her mother, he says,
not knowing any other reason why she spoils the children,
or why he comes in from the combine with his wrenches
to find potatoes boiled dry in their pot,
his wife in the parlor on the bench at her piano,
not playing you understand, just sitting
like a fern in that formal room.
So much time to think, these long hours.
Like her mother, each night she goes
to bed when her husband's tired, gets up when he gets up,
and in between tries not to move,
listening to the sleep of this good man who
lies beside and over her.
So much time alone, since everything
he knows is practical.
Just this morning he plunged an ice
pick into the bloated side of the cow
unable to rise, dying where it fell, its several stomachs
having failed--
too full, he said, of sweet wet clover.