Excerpts > Winter 2003

Alice Friman

Remembering in Lilac and Heart-Shaped Leaves


Holcomb Gardens

See how they’ve laid out the lilacs.
A parade—seven rows across,
sixteen down. And I who never
cared much for spring, the pasteled chirp
and buzz of it, lose myself among them—
tuba in the flutes, nettle in the iris bed.
It isn’t the scent, though they beat out
last month’s hyacinths guaranteed to stink up
a whole house despite their famous hair.

Look, my middle name’s not Joy.
It’s Ruth, named for the stranger
sniffling and nose-blowing her way
across wilderness, following the scuff
of a mother-in-law’s shoe. Ruth the Moabite,
the Blotter, the Good, programmed
to soak up sorrow the way an unlit match
is programmed to absorb the dark.

You know this story—
how she stood, lightning rod
in the fields of luck where everyone knows
rich equals handsome equals virtuous.
And if Boaz turned out Palooka
who scratched his parts and wore his
money belt to bed, who bibbled over dinner
about goats and the price of barley,
who eyed her bodice while he grouched
of fallow fields and picked his ear,
who wants to know?

It’s beginnings we want. Act I.
Curtain up, and there she is
standing amid Keats’s alien corn—woman
on the threshold, Rachel at the well,
Cinderella before the ball or Juliet after,
trembling toward sacrifice. How we want
to keep them in that moon’s first spotlight—
Ruth’s straight back, Juliet’s hand to cheek
in gesture and cue with Romeo the nail-biter
swoony behind lilacs—the night air
staggering beneath the weight
of all their untaken breaths.

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