BRIDE
She wakes and dresses quickly in the dark,
buttoning her bodice one-handed,
her other palm smoothing back the sheet
against its linen companion, a pillowcase
etched around with her smallest stitches,
both newly released from the hope chest
she tended so carefully, into what?
Into this thin mountain air and strangeness.
She folds the counterpane up over the pillows
lying there like two heads facing the ceiling
and then bends to shove stockinged feet into
her boots. She blows on the banked fre in the stove
for a long time until a fame tongues up.
Out the door with a woolen shawl to pull warm eggs
from under the laying hens — four this morning,
that will please him — and breaks them
into the skillet already spitting grease.
How clearly the common gestures are revealed
in a new setting, she thinks. My elbow lifting
as the eggshell cracks is a teal’s wing. Spoon
coffee into the pot and my wrist cocks
like a ground squirrel’s inquisitive head.
The goat’s bell tinkles from the feld and through
the window she sees his brown dog race across
the yard, each paw kicking up a little explosion
of dust and here he comes after, a tall, square-
shouldered man in a felt hat carrying the bucket
in one hand and swinging the milking stool
in the other, his eyes on the hill behind the house —
he’s cutting trees in his mind, she thinks,
measuring how many for the barn roof and then
he sees her at the window and almost smiles.