Next poem is called "Her Patience."
The speaker in the poem is a woman, I guess of middle age--
a farm woman.
She's talking.
"Her Patience."
Eve was commanded into sin, an abstraction
I could not understand.
God was angry or bored, which is the way of men.
This is what I think, walking the lake shore
a mile from our farm.
I wear patched trousers, too big around the waist,
my husband's shoes, and a kerchief
so big a stranger could not see my face.
And I think, a woman's task is to spin and remember.
When winter is black, nothing lives under the ice.
And when it cracks, each morning is harder to bear.
Once I was pretty, and took myself to the barn in the dark,
and rolled in the hard dirt.
For a week, lice bred in my hair,
and the cows, watching from their stalls,
mooed and licked their calves.
I thought I'd cured myself of beauty,
but I entered an age of beauty I'd never known before.
Men are born with spades in their hands.
My father, digging the grave of his second son.
My husband, battering the head of a neighbor
who entered my kitchen at noon.
This was my husband's dream, told with a funny smile.
We spin and we weave, and the years pass.
Our first born son, I can't corrupt or comprehend.
I call him bread as I walk about my chores.
But the second son, my favorite, I call revenge.
Like a girl, how they think of a girl,
he'll find no useful work.
Mornings he goes off and wet stones leap to his touch.
He dries them to the thinnest veins of quartz.
At night, he reassembles in my doorway.
He varies according to light, the wild
rose pales as he passes, and at dusk, the crows
seem to gather the power of speech.
Into my middle age I've carried myself,
a little dry about the eyes and certain patches of skin.
I have few ideas, but I break in strange places,
and have seen signs in the lake that God is preparing me
for a trip.
When I was young, it all began in blood,
and blood stained my thighs.
Now my beauty is a patience I wear well.
And now my son, like a pale-skinned daughter,
who sows no wheat, who covets a brother's spade,
walks with me by the water in the woods all afternoon.
As in the beginning, when Eve was commanded into sin,
and having no rights upon the matter,
took the serpent to her breasts, and did what she was told."