Julie Brooks Barbour
A Vocabulary
My grandmother recited recipes from memory.
She wrote nothing down. Even when I offered pen and paper, she insisted on speaking. Ingredients and measurements might settle into my memory if she repeated them often enough, like a spell. I refused that vocabulary. It was like science, and I only liked science when it pertained to animals and their habitats. I adopted the language of stories, took the pen and paper I’d offered my grandmother and wrote my way out of the kitchen, away from boiling water and baking temperatures. Outside, I dug old bottles from the dirt in the chicken house, dusted the soil off their curved bodies and traced the raised letters; I plucked stamen and stigma from passion flowers until they became dancers I twirled between my fingers. The sun’s heat could bear down on me but not the heat of the kitchen or its rules. My grandmother never stopped trying to lure me in, offering banana pudding or cherry cobbler at the end of a school day, waiting to tell me when I finished of cups measured or how much fruit to slice but I slipped out the screen door after cleaning my bowl, my only work in that room. Music for the Night, Music for the Day
To have been a farmer’s bride,
rising alone, eating toast and sausage before waking the children, husband already out in the barn, collecting tools for the day’s work, or on a cold morning littering the floor with splinters of wood. Instead, I married a poet and his child who lie awake listening to the night, who darken their rooms against the morning light that I still revere no matter how I wed. They pose questions to the dark, follow the phases of the moon, speak to its many eyes and mouths. From those dark spaces they hear music, soft and indiscernible to me, songs loosened by a beam of light from the hall or my own voice calling out to those chords. Lover of the morning, I swoon to the crow’s rough call and the dove’s soft whisper. They court the barred owl’s shivered chant, the dog’s lonesome aria. Each in our own worlds, I marry the farmer and take my breakfast alone. The Baby Discovers
Her mouth is a cavern that begins the longing
of her human life. My breast, a ball, and the orange nose of her doll all warrant a search by the finely tuned buds of her tongue. Nothing escapes: bits of torn paper and a cat’s whisker are pulled from her mouth, turned over by fingers, investigated by eyes, tried again by taste. Her tongue will never want for these small things so eagerly again. Once her fingertips learn the odd tingle of sensation, once her mouth learns certain textures it touches have no taste, no smell, then she will yearn for the candies, the soft creams melting in her mouth. One day, she will seek softness and warmth beyond my breast—the smoothness of someone else’s skin against her lips—and every inch of her body will learn what now her tongue only knows, what now her mouth opens itself toward.
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The Bend and Rise of Streets
The white inside wing of a gull
gave brightness to the gray street this morning, fluttering between parked cars as I passed then the sudden rising up, the pivotal turn away from me. Wings open, dark eyes between that wingspan, the flight so certain and fluid I lost direction. I stuttered and slowed the car and shook off following, let memory be my compass in this bend and rise of streets. On this road, two stop signs then a right turn at the flashing signal. Up the steep hill. Another right at the gravel road. I could remember street names but my body recalls more easily the upward slope of a hill or the bend within a curved road. I lean and turn, a gull heading north for the summer. A car and a current. A path and a migratory pattern. Goldenrod and pine trees blur into gray bridges and roads. Starlings
While I rock my daughter to sleep,
fledglings try their wings on the other side of the window, flapping up and down so crookedly it’s as if they were on strings. The phone rings. The timer dings. The old desires rise up: dancing, laughter, familiar faces from my youth. I rock them to sleep with the baby, back and forth, ignoring the phone, the supper in the oven. Let it all burn. The young birds outside are learning to light on tree branches and shoot toward the clouds. The baby sighs and shifts into slumber. I put myself at ease admiring the birds’ black feathers as the sun shimmers them green. Laundry Day
Corner by corner I hang the sheets:
dark blue, red, a floral print tattered at the edges. They whip themselves into one another with the breeze, sometimes twisting into a snarl. My mother would drape her white sheets one over two lines, a tent I would run through. I show my daughter what I used to do. She follows with mud under her fingernails, hair hanging in her face, her smile the same as any child dirty among the wash. Next door, my neighbor’s white shirts flap like sails, armpits stained yellow. Across the street the widow hangs her briefs to dry. It is a bright, clear day among the houses. Watching
It was a haunting, a shadow:
a hawk making a meal of crow on my patio. I watched the hawk pick his prey clean, gulping strips of flesh. Then he vanished. I craned my neck to see what was left: a skeleton, perfectly intact-- a museum piece reflecting the late-afternoon light. On the other side of the patio, my young daughter stood at the door, palms pressed against the glass. Neither she nor I stirred. It was a moment left to itself, a vision I woke from in the morning and kept glancing back toward with a mother’s attentive eye that could only watch. |
