<\/p>\n
Folding<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You are folding the clothes of a child
\nand thinking about this afternoon and the month after next
\nwhen the ghost of your husband carries the ghost of your girl,
\n“She’s fallen 6 feet from the porch rail to the sidewalk,”
\nand the child sleeps in his arms breath shallow as at birth.<\/p>\n
Touch her skin and you feel it collapse like a parachute.
\nWatch her eyes flicker open, they are murky, do not reflect
\neven the clouds up there waiting to come together,
\nand now the future waits,
\nall of you suddenly pinched behind the neck.<\/p>\n
In the next minutes she will respond to her name.
\nYou can see in her waking
\nthere are clouds in her eyes
\nand you remember her saying this morning
\nher friends believed god lived in the sky
\nbut she knew she would have seen him up there
\nriding the clouds and anyway she’d heard on television
\nthat god had a purple head.<\/p>\n
The hours in intensive care you will watch
\nclouds sheet the sky like hospital linen
\nand hear the chirp of heart monitors like crickets
\nout of place in the night.<\/p>\n
This night you are a stage mother pushing
\nyour child to perform for neurologists and nurses
\nin the reciting of names, her own, her brother’s, her dog’s,
\nin the telling of how many fingers
\nand the matching of her finger to theirs.<\/p>\n
After this only waiting is left.
\nHours unfold out of themselves like a telescope
\nand you watch the sky turn the lightest shade of purple.<\/p>\n
Then you pray to her god and to all
\nthe grape popsicles in the freezer, to her purple crayon,
\nto the foxglove and alyssum in the yard,
\nto all purple things that they may keep their color,
\nretrieve it from her bruised forehead, ear, stem of her brain.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Folding” is from Behind Us The Way Grows Wider,<\/a> due out in a month or two from Pixelita Press, Port Townsend, WA, and first appeared in Poetry Northwest<\/a><\/em> and then in Love From the Coastal Route.<\/em><\/p>\n Sheila Bender is a nationally known author, poet, writing instructor and mentor. She has published six books on writing and numerous books of poetry. Sheila is the founder of Writing it Real,<\/em> <\/a>a very successful writing instructional program, and her latest venture is working with Pixelita Press<\/a> for an eBook series for iPad that includes instruction via interactive writing prompts using photography. Discover more of Sheila’s work at Writing it Real.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Folding You are folding the clothes of a child and thinking about this afternoon and the month after next when the ghost of your husband carries the ghost of your girl, “She’s fallen 6 feet from the porch … Continue reading