The Paddock Review

Passing the Orchards

 

Driving back from you, I pass silent through blanched winter landscapes. It’s late.

The bare apple trees seem angry, their spindly branches raise bristling fists

into the grey afternoon sky.

 

I know they’ll blossom and it will be a miracle. I try to see us in the future, slowly

struggling through the grassy lane at some farm, a bag of apples in one hand, your walker 

making ruts in the green earth.

 

Like pie crust and cold butter, I want to be that person with her hands in 

the dough, working it and making it mine. Laying each slice down for the oven’s warmth,

the succulence of life.

I imagine a bright kitchen, an orchard, the highway, is a place to get to

and must be better than rolling my eyes to the past, to the rearview mirror I love,

so fiercely, all the time.

 

I’m moving through the present in the slow lane, letting the cars pass me, but the present

is still a place I struggle with. I visit, I kiss your cheek, I try to stay calm when you get frustrated.

But there seems no place to lay down my grief.

 

I’ve tucked it in the trunk.

It comes with me everywhere.

…..

This poem is from the chapbook The Red Strobe by Theta Pavis (Finishing Line Press) and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-red-strobe-by-theta-pavis/

This fierce book unfolds in a landscape marked with loss. Its sparse, direct, and gorgeous language celebrates survival, daughters, mothers, sisters and the whiplash of girlhood. The Red Strobe bears witness to the labor of caretaking and love.