WEBVTT

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Next poem is called
"Her Patience."

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The speaker in the poem is a
woman, I guess of middle age--

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a farm woman.

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She's talking.

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"Her Patience."

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Eve was commanded into
sin, an abstraction

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I could not understand.

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God was angry or bored,
which is the way of men.

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This is what I think,
walking the lake shore

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a mile from our farm.

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I wear patched trousers,
too big around the waist,

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my husband's shoes,
and a kerchief

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so big a stranger
could not see my face.

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And I think, a woman's task
is to spin and remember.

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When winter is black,
nothing lives under the ice.

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And when it cracks, each
morning is harder to bear.

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Once I was pretty, and took
myself to the barn in the dark,

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and rolled in the hard dirt.

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For a week, lice
bred in my hair,

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and the cows, watching
from their stalls,

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mooed and licked their calves.

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I thought I'd cured
myself of beauty,

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but I entered an age of
beauty I'd never known before.

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Men are born with
spades in their hands.

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My father, digging the
grave of his second son.

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My husband, battering
the head of a neighbor

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who entered my kitchen at noon.

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This was my husband's dream,
told with a funny smile.

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We spin and we weave,
and the years pass.

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Our first born son, I can't
corrupt or comprehend.

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I call him bread as I
walk about my chores.

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But the second son, my
favorite, I call revenge.

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Like a girl, how
they think of a girl,

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he'll find no useful work.

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Mornings he goes off and wet
stones leap to his touch.

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He dries them to the
thinnest veins of quartz.

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At night, he reassembles
in my doorway.

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He varies according
to light, the wild

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rose pales as he passes,
and at dusk, the crows

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seem to gather the
power of speech.

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Into my middle age
I've carried myself,

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a little dry about the eyes
and certain patches of skin.

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I have few ideas, but I
break in strange places,

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and have seen signs in the
lake that God is preparing me

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for a trip.

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When I was young, it
all began in blood,

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and blood stained my thighs.

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Now my beauty is a
patience I wear well.

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And now my son, like a
pale-skinned daughter,

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who sows no wheat, who
covets a brother's spade,

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walks with me by the water
in the woods all afternoon.

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As in the beginning, when
Eve was commanded into sin,

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and having no rights
upon the matter,

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took the serpent to her breasts,
and did what she was told."

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