REMEMBERING MARCH WIND THROUGH ORGANDY CURTAINS

March has come in like a lion, blowing the clouds around like sheets on a clothesline. I call up a poem I wrote about remembering my grandmother again and again, her bloomers that swelled with wind on the clothesline, alongside her nightgowns and bedsheets. Her organdy curtains the wind teased when she opened the windows still bloom in my memory.

Again

I lie down in her sea bed that bears

me back home to the nothing left

after her house burned around it.

Her lavender handkerchief knotted

round nickels and dimes. On her dresser

a brooch in the shape of a peacock’s tail.

Organdy curtains that breathed in

and out when she opened the windows

for March to blow through like a lioness

stalking the boxwoods or a lamb bleating

out by the pump house. Her hairpins

sown over the rugs. Her voluminous apron.

Her false teeth that grinned

every night from a tall iced-tea glass

as she pulled off her house dress,

her shimmy, her bloomers

that even now swell like a mainsail with

nothingness. Lorna Doone shortbread

she nibbled till she fell asleep, leaving crumbs

in the bed sheets like sand from the white beach

at Panama City whenever I crawled into bed

with her body that smelled of the ocean

at low tide and tasted of salt

when she pulled me too close to her.

from COMING TO REST

LSU Press Poetry Series, 2006