It Was You

—for Susan

It was you I felt after that wedding

in which I caught the garter belt

one-handed, as if snagging a fly ball.

You’re next, everyone had said,

because that’s what people say

in such circumstances.

Even so, you were the fragrance

of cut grass on the drive home

on the Great River Road. It was you

who walked beside me when I climbed

the stile and the bluff to that pasture

with the Mississippi overlook—

who noticed the cattle in the corner

all facing the same direction,

the gentle rise of the burial mounds,

like breasts. Not certainties, these,

like barbed wire or a telephone call.

More fleeting, but real enough,

like driving through a cool patch

with the windows open

on a summer night. It was you

who climbed the mountain

with me up to the Master’s shrine—

the attar of roses, that girl’s laugh,

the smile out of thin air

that went with it—a daughter’s,

or a daughter’s daughter’s laugh

chiming right through. You.

Published in San Pedro River Review, Fall 2018