Tuesday Poem: From The Grove in the Eye of Light Poem Series

Cherry

Jean Scalvino covered her round breasts
with an apron and swept the sidewalk every day.
But the store she owned with her brother
stayed dark and murky, its hardware
hung from the ceiling: coffee pots and ladles,
scrub boards and galvanized buckets, ivory cups
and dish mops, all the tools, the apparatus of housework,
waiting to be adopted and wrapped in newspaper.

I watched her hands as she smoothed it over.
Her fingers had bulbs on the ends, big as cherries
her fingers, her whole body curling this way and that,
her bones like old branches, sagging,
though the fruit had fallen away long ago.

How she lovingly criss-crossed
the whole thing with string,
and finished it off with a bow,
as if she were diapering
a newborn she’d just delivered,
so she could give it into your care.