Photo in the Fruit Bowl

To and from my coffee carafe, I pass

the cobalt blue fruit bowl Mama left

when she went to nap in the ethereal

blue folds of her Jesus’ robes.

I never look on that bowl without seeing her,

sometimes freckled and henna-haired,

pedal-pushered and laughing at apples

that plain refused not to roll from their stack.

Other times, white-haired and pale

as an angel.  Either way, I see her bowl full

and her hand keeping it so.  Not the same

with me.  This crockery treasure’s become

a catch-all, a pedestal-based, blue mesa,

barely concave, to hold the odd this or that

above my table’s menagerie.

“Menagerie” because each bill, receipt, recipe,

magazine, hat, cap, gardening glove, summer pruning shears

or winter neck muffler—I swear they all sprout

arms and legs to crawl, run, walk, and stumble

(from some tidy place where I have surely stored them)

to clutter

and mob the bowl.

But today, as I pass to the coffee carafe,

a single snapshot sits inside the blue—

We are all glossy,

red-eyed,

one-dimensional

flat,

with a pine-slashed apricot sky posing as backdrop:

Lake Tahoe’s Heavenly ski-lift, near sundown.

Above the table holding Mama’s bowl

holding my kids, grandkids, and me,

a fan whirs.  Light shines down and everything

moves, reflec-flec-flecting off blue.

We are eleven strong—

We are three generations of us.

I could scratch our names in pencil or pen

so you’d know who’s who, but—honestly,

when you need a name scrawled under,

behind, or over some forgotten someone

wedged into a box or cornered on some page,

isn’t it time             to just let them rest?

I tell myself     it’s enough     that I know who we are.

Then Riley Lynn, in the fan-light whir

on the glossy flat, is wiggling free, climbing

down from her daddy’s arms, walking her chubby feet

across the bowl bottom, and inching her way

up the rim.

I cock my head, screw my smile into a frown, say,

“Ri-ley . . . What are you up to?”

In her usual way, she ignores,

toddles on over to drop

onto the table’s top, moves

much too close to the edge. 

“Hode me, Grandma,” she says.

Sometimes

refilling my cup

as I pass to and from

takes a very long time.

Between Mama laughing the apples to stack,

and Riley daring the edge with her toes,

time whistles through the fan whir,

and I’m happy to find my coffee’s gone cold,

again.

It can wait.  Now,

I need a pencil or pen, something to scrawl,

“Opal Marie Ivy Due”

so Riley will know

just who it was

that first made our lives
so full.

home

about lynn

gallery

writes

store

ouch