Sally Keith /  Restoration        


The line is neck centered, halving the body’s weight so that her stance has no jut.  It has
no awkward lean.  And her hands fit inside of her face, like fretting, a wall, relief.  These
hands that throw the axe and plumb the earth—furiously they nail the beams together. 
They split the cloth to wrap a wound.  They nimbly thread the eye to fix a gown.  They
fit—almost beautiful, struck, wheezing and gray.  They make a cave for the eyes, but
light still slips in finger slats, unevenly, giving night a yellow-blue.  But behind her
hands, imagine, her eyes staying shut—the bolt then for a twice chained door.

Stay.  The picket fence, even if storm blown, I’ll come to do the painting, I’ll come to
tear the forsythia away.  The bluebird house, even if the jays.  I’ll come.  I’ll stand in the
field with you.  See, already, I’m scaring them away.  I’m waving my arms, mad, in the
sky.  Then the old farmhouse, because I’ve studied the order they fall.  The window
frames go out from their squares.  The façade like a hand of splayed cards.  The roof
begins to buckle.  Then the people leave.  A chair gets left on the porch.  Splotches of
copper decay on the legs.  And then begins the floor.  Stay.  I’ll bring in a lamp and light
us a corner.  I’ll bring in a plant and two chairs.  We will live.

Light is pouring through the dust, breeding in beams, making a fugue for dark walls.  I
want to sit with you.  Come back from the fields.  Look, I’m stopped in the space of this
door.  It is calm here.  Even if the wind is blowing, lifting the siding up from the house,
swirling the dirt to eddies and branding a silvery sheen on the soy. Even if you think you
can’t forget the storm.  Look, now.  Ignore the wind.  Ignore the watery, watery road. 


CUE:  A Journal of Prose Poetry
Winter 2005, Volume II, Issue I