Vinegar Moon
by
Donna Biffar

 

Releasing Hazel
for Hazel H.

But then I thought of Hazel,
named for a tree,
whose last name is lost
among the branches
of the red buds that grew
when she was eighty and I was twenty,

when spring was nothing more
than seeds of flesh and sex. And Hazel
knocked on my door each day
in the Knotty Pines Trailer Park
in Red Bud, Illinois,
and said I saw you,
I saw you unloading groceries,
hanging laundry, kissing that man-

and gave me a cloth doll she'd made
to look like me. I paid her twenty
because she needed food,
and never thought about
her life the next day,
or the day after,
when I said I was leaving,
and she laid her old head back
against the couch, comfortable
among my new cookbooks
and sharp curtains. And she cried.
And I didn't care

when she called me for help
at my new place,
or offered a trinket she'd made,
something blooming, she said. And then,
I don't see you anymore.
Finally, the tree quit,
and the calls stopped coming like prayers
I didn't answer.

Her last name is somewhere,
Hazel, named for a tree,
in an old phone book,
or a Christmas card she signed, maybe
in the hard December fields
beyond this house.
Judas Tree, she called it,
and red, she said, is the color
of shame.

The Killing

My dreams of you are empty rooms
and a circle drive
in a town I cannot see.
Your voice is on the phone
saying something fundamental
about the gospel of Magdalene,
for the love of Christ,
like the tearing of flesh
from a bruised apple's heart.

When your wife found out
you said I forgive you
to my first dream. And you stayed,
chanting of the new church,
kids, the leopard skins of love,
the knife and forked dinners with the wife,
until your face emptied

to the window of the flower shop.
My dreams of a bride's bouquet
and funeral carnations,
the neon lights
dead as the snow,
scraped you into a coat and hat you'd never wear.
It's been twenty years.
There are no words to this dream.

I lie.
I say it hurts to write this.
Your name is on the box in thick black letters.
Still the circle drive leads to a house
and porch where you never are.
The coat and hat remain
in the closet over there, hanging.
Your breath is shallow.
Take heart. The heart will beat
twenty minutes after this kill,
and your voice will linger in the dust,
and I'll recall your scent, your trace of heat.