Wyoming
Eighth grade social studies. Mrs. Linden has us drag our desks
into a U. White cardstock folded into tents in front of us:
Kansas. Delaware. Connecticut. A mock Senate.
I pick Wyoming. It feels the most exotic and unlikely
of the states I haven’t been to yet. Next to me, Suzanne
is repping something Midwestern – Michigan, Indiana, maybe Ohio,
its two ends like wheels rolling smoothly along. I can’t remember exactly.
Suzanne would, but that’s the problem. She’s no longer here to ask. I decorate
my tent card with cowboy hats and buffalo, mountains and valleys of the W and Y
strange and beautiful in purple marker. Back then, I never learned much
about the actual place, its towns announced on green highway signs
promoting tiny populations that years later appear glowing
in my headlights as I drive through the real state on my way west.
Outside our legislative duties, Suzanne and I huddle at the lunch table
closest to the door discussing the latest Adam Ant album and what Toni said
in history yesterday. If she’s slipping from me even then, cells degenerating
somewhere inside her while we sip chocolate milk from waxy paper spouts,
I don’t know it. Just as I’m yet ignorant of Wyoming’s oil pumps, dipping
their giant metal beaks again and again toward the earth, or what it can mean
to live in a place so empty. She laughs at my jokes, listens to
my tirades against the gym teachers, orders her food without spice
from the Mexican joint we haunt on Fridays. What do we talk about
every day until 1 a.m.? What don’t we? We drift after college,
see each other on and off, keep up through our mothers.
What she wants for herself is simple: find love, teach.
While I fret and flounder, chart course after course, more
and more distance accrued, until I drive through
a Wyoming night with a man still a stranger,
ticking off the quiet miles, the endless open space.
* * * * *
The Baker’s Wife
Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 C.E., burying the towns of Pompeii, Herculanean, and other nearby villages. A famous fresco, found intact in Pompeii at the home of the baker Terentius Neo, today hangs in Naples’ National Archaeological Museum.
Portrait of the couple at the peak
of their youth: her hair’s sharp part,
his gaze meeting the viewer’s, staring
through the ash of history.
Each hold tools of the literate —
he the volumen, the scroll, she
the wax tablet and stylus.
But oh, how the experts go on —
why the two stand in equally placed poses,
(Surely an anomaly!) how she,
as well as he, holds the keys to words.
(A woman who wrote? Hardly. Someone
had to display the complements to new prosperity.)
She remains unnamed, they remind,
on the gate that bears his baker’s calling card.
Dear Sister, here’s the vision I prefer:
Each morning, freshly baked —
the smell of bread. Your husband
bent and sweaty at an oven,
while in the next room you pen
your thoughts of the day ahead.
And that last time —
how you watched,
strange hue — purple-gray
clouds bloom and bloom.
In your hurried transcription —
the sun a muted stub, sky
begging
for an all-new description.