Between Mates


Yesterday, while you were away
and I was in Wyoming with the Folks
we stepped outside, lifted hands and
hat brims high to feel the wet
cling slick and cool onto our face.

“I love rain like this,” I said.

“My old Grandma would call this one a soft day,”
said Dad, and soft it was
second day of soaking wet
barely more than mist
dripping trees, big open space
snugged close and gray
in cotton haze.

“Grandma was married about three times,”
he said. Something none of us had heard before,
and in answer to our arching brows,
“outlived them all,” he said.

“I guess you never had the chance to know her,”
he says to me.
“Neither did I,” sad Mom, “Anna was gone
before I found you.”
“She was like your Grandma Myrtle,” he says to Mom,
thus invoking the name of our well-worn family saint—
the good one, the kind one, the patient one who never complained—
“Anna Drube was small and awful good like that,” he says.

My tender insides swelled and smiled
at Mama’s bemused surprise,
at fond recalls of long dead grandmas,
and to think that some thirty-seven annum’s hence
there are still these small revealings
between mates.

And I see how it is bound to be
between thee and me…

my love.