to remember who made you, where you’re from,
how you carry the scent of geranium and saddle soap,
hoof trimmings and mock orange—unbidden—as you slide
through another country, with its noises and flavors,
its precisions about gesture, what pasta tonight,
what subjunctive right now—essential encounters—
all astonishing, until missing my own people
avalanches down with a roar, grief burning to sorrow,
the days carry on, if you call it that, what remains—
sharp tang of small moments—how delicately she
eased her old dog out the door, how he wiped his face,
stomping snow from his shoes, out of hundreds
of unknowable people, lazily streaming all this Sunday
through Bologna’s huge piazza, it’s you we miss.
Helen Wickes grew up in Chester County, Pennsylvania and now lives in Oakland, California. With a Ph.D. in psychology, she worked for many years as a psychotherapist. In 2002 she received an M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her first of four collections of poems, In Search of Landscape, was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press. In addition to the Delmarva Review,
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