Swallows Poem by Talvikki Ansel

Swallows



Summer's over, and we never even
drank at the Ocean House, that yellow
elegance they'll tear down this year.
Wind sweeps the locust leaves sideways,
I read the journals
of Dorothy Wordsworth: the lucid days,
walks, wet skirts twisted around ankles,
scrambles up rocks and through damp fields.
Swallows nest above her cottage window.
She bakes bread, cuts and turns sheets,
papers a room. Dinner in bed for her brother
William, mutton. John, the other brother,
captain of a great ship bound for China.
Lowering clouds and a swallow swept sideways,
comfrey and laudanum sleep, all gone now,
those torn-up lives. A storm knocks windows.
Windfalls, hard green knobs in the grass,
gather wasps in the orchard.
Half-rotted, wormy, the ones we found here,
boiled and boiled to a pale jelly, celandine,
or someone's hesitant birthstone.
I stash a jar in the back cupboard,
for good luck, sweet talisman against rot.

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