All This Distance
I saw her half a century ago, in a sheer nightgown,
sleepy eyed and sultry, emerging at ten a.m. into
a warming kitchen where Paulie has cooked us up a
mess of pancakes, and he and I, both kids of twelve,
have settled at the small blue table, our plates stacked high.
It seems she hasn’t a qualm.
I sneak a look, the kitchen window just beyond her chair,
the brightness of the summer day dissolving her gown.
My heart rises to my neck, drums the back of my head,
thumps giddy in my chest, and I look away, not wanting
Paulie to notice my ogling his brother’s wife.
He glances at me, raises his eyebrows like Groucho,
shovels in a bite, maple syrup dripping from his lips, and winks.
I thought of that morning often when I was young,
wishing I had not averted my eyes, wishing I had memorized
every glorious drooping curve of her breasts, every soft caress
of her gown against the startling thrust of nipples.
This morning, from the obituary page,
she smiles with such innocence
across the dark of forgotten decades at me,
a child of almost seventy years.
Published in Trajectory, Fall 2014