The Year I Lived with My Grandmother

That year stays with me like the smell of marigolds 
on my fingers. Behind my grandmother’s warnings 
against strangers and forgetting my gloves, 
I heard the steady hum of blood in blackberries, 
the rustle of black widow spiders in brown 
paper bags. On my tenth birthday, grandmother 
covered her eyes with her hands and called 
to my dead grandfather, “Return. It’s time.”
I fell asleep to the sound of palominos
below my window. In dreams, peacocks 
wearing gold necklaces called me outside. 
Behind rows and rows of fences, I felt lives 
unfold like horses galloping or grass growing.
Everything was wind, invisible and moving.

ELLEN GOLDSMITH

Ellen Goldsmith is the author of Where to Look, Such Distances, and No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect, which won the Hudson Valley Writers Center 1997 chapbook contest. She lives in Cushing, Maine, and is professor emeritus of The University of New York.