a golden shovel after Lee Sharkey’s “In the Capital of a Small Republic”
It sounds like the oldest of instruments, stringed, the
plectrum between fingers, a hollow pear. What is a lover in hat and scarf at the stove when dead
is the roadmap? He asks me for something unexpectedly beautiful, like a poet
might, so I leave my stone home for the garden. Here is the persimmon tree. Here is
the sage, feather-soft and gray as the new year walking
its way through a door I cannot seem to close. I hear the kettle sing, turn to see the
blue flame. He pours water for tea, and water pours from one side of the street
to the other, gathering in thumbprints where four cobbles meet and meet again,
one after one, as far as the road goes. Beyond that: mountains. I say the word for I,
say the word for love. Turn again toward the man in my kitchen, before wending am-
ong oregano and peppers. I bend to brush off their leaves, listening
for answers to questions posed by rainfall, for
responses to soldiers who smoke three hills from here, soldiers who find my him
curious enough to stop, the stop unavoidable as pages of a calendar. Through
my coat and sweaters and undershirt, my skin shivers. The fog low. I, quiet, return to My
dear, synonyms for love on my tongue like ice that holds on a lamp-gold window.
Tara Ballard is author of House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press), winner of the 2016 Many Voices Project Prize in poetry. Her poems have been published in The Adirondack Review, Diode, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.