|
The frozen food aisle: a place of limited excitement.
Except that one night, when I was picking out a pizza.
Your mother rounded the aisle, and she gave me
a loaded smile-extra toppings-and asked
How have you been? "have" dripping and distressed.
And since she'd always been kind, even through the long break up,
I told a softened sort of truth
involving a mild depression,
easily shed and discarded like so much cardboard and cellophane.
And how had you all been, I asked,
reaching with trembling casualness into a freezer case.
The exact reply is lost somewhere
in the stacks of boxes,
but the words proposed to her last night
stick, much as my hand did,
crawled over with frost when I left it
resting on a metal panel.
I picked randomly at the chilled boxes and cans
as we pushed slowly down the row.
With hollow contritions she tried
to suck something other than a laugh ("it's just the shock") from me
and to pull my eyes from ingredient lists.
But I was slipping between pyramids
of orange juice tins, wafting paper thin,
carefully intent on not disturbing the delicate
balance that kept them stacked
just so.
CAROLINE GRAF
|
