DiaBLOGue

Every bride asks herself, What if 
he doesn’t show up? What then? 

I trace my past life through hairdos: ringlets, 
pigtails, finger waves, straightened-on-juice-cans,
bouffant, French braids, and—worst—sausage rolls
flying back from my face like ditsy, exuberant wings. 

In a plowed field at the rim 
of the southern Utah desert 
one of those Schnebbley brothers 

Our children were conceived 
            in a carved maple bed sent 
from Milwaukee on the train 
            by my husband’s grandmother in 1937. 

She never speaks to him anymore. Her tongue
is as bone-dry as an irrigation ditch in winter, 
her ankles grimy as a crooked ewe’s. Dribbled 
wine and spots of sour milk stain her blouse, 
and now his lead sheep has given up the bell. 

I once sat on a plateau’s edge 
It began on my back, with updrafts. 
They rose along the white escarpment 

So this is how you’ll preserve 
me, Lord? in a slosh of brine? 
Go ahead, though I’ve borne no fruit, torn 
loose from my roots and gone my own way.