The washing line
hangs across the backyard,
slung from makeshift post
to post;
our clothes brush
lazily
against the
yarrow, their toes in the
goldenrod;
they sway in the warm breeze,
soaked as they are
in sunshine,
while I unpeg and fold
dreamily,
into the basket.
I am hardly aware of my heel
slipping
back into a yielding crevice in the grass,
and for a drowsy moment,
don’t really see or understand the writhing
funnel
of yellow and black
rising into the air behind me;
I am too slow –
lulled by the sweetness of the meadow,
by the pleasing dryness of the clothes.
Only one yellow jacket
stings me –
I suppose this is luck –
on the underside of my wrist,
beneath my watch buckle –
and, as in some dreadful movie,
suddenly
I am running,
hoping to outrun them,
behind the screen door
slamming
washing abandoned to the
damp of evening.
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Pain
leaves a scoured,
scarred and hollow place
deep in the cellars
of memory;
an illegible space,
it is usually
impervious to the ordinariness
of life,
to the bringing in of the washing,
late in the summer:
only here –
as I hold ice against my wrist,
stomach heaving,
while this concentrated
yellow and blackness,
this fury of a yellow jacket,
pours
into skin, into cells,
as my hand and forearm swell
and redden –
does something in my body
begin to recall,
to tap out
pain’s half-forgotten code –
though still too overwhelming,
too vertiginous,
to wield into a simple word –
here, write this down,
remember, this blur of wrist –
specific, my hand, my
forearm, throbbing –
and a swarming cloud of outraged
wasps,
this provoking,
swamping
hum of speech –
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