AND I REMEMBER only this a window box with red geraniums overlooking a cobblestone street our room up a dark narrow staircase and you in that ridiculous tub with Paris all around us the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, Notre Dame always your knees scrunched up by your ears in the bright blue tile tub of our attic cranny above the noisy Rue de Vaugirard framed in red blossoms nothing more.
More Quotes from Elaine Christensen:
WAKING In spring I write of earth still half asleep, of matted grass and weeds not yet aware that stretching fingers stir the soil down deep and sift the frozen dreams of roots with air that breathes forgotten scents of blossoming. I write of branches stiff and gnarled with cold, like ancient bones that can't remember spring or how the sun could painlessly unfold each timid, paling leaf. I write of birds returning one by one. They leave their flocks for tempting caterpillars scrawled like words across my garden wall of crumbling rocks. These early signs of spring unthaw my brain from numbing winter rest. I write again.Elaine Christensen
Inside me there is a dancer. Inside this middle-aged body of a housewife there is a dancer. Don't laugh. I have danced with sunflowers in sandy September fields with fruit trees each spring, blossoms in my hair at the lake's edge in winter where tall grass and thin reeds wobble on pointed toes in the wind and in summer with the sea where anyone can find the dancer inside. Don't laugh. Barefoot, arms outstretched, palms raised to the sky, to the birds, to the clouds, to God, who choreographed it all, I danced. I knew every step and the waves stood up and bowed.
Elaine Christensen
Covenant Water runs from a spout below my open window. A February sun thaws what's left of Thursday's storm. It is a day of whites and blues a squint-eyed day, a hold-still, breathe-deep day. When God made the world and put Adam and Eve in the garden of greens and orchids and grapes, part of Him longed for the day when they would discover winter. When it snows in the South, parents wake their children, even at three in the morning to see flakes like goose feathers, to feel them tingling on their eyelids. Children can't begin to understand what is given them, what it costs, that the cost doesn't matter. Dear God, don't let me take this day for granted. White edges every fence. Each roof is an untouched field. The honey locust offers clumps of snow like winter fruit left unpicked in its limbs. The ponderosa spreads voluminous petticoats out to dry. Light refracts, splinters across the snow like sequins scattered and hand-sewn on my daughter's wedding veil. It is a day for making vows, the kind you tell no one, the kind you keep.
Elaine Christensen
Last Request Maybe it's because the days are growing shorter, and each one starts and ends in cold, maybe that's why the sun on my back this afternoon is a loving arm not a lover's, but a son's, the one who seldom comes anymore for love. Maybe it's becau.
Elaine Christensen
LEAVE-TAKING Leave-taking is not birds gathered for one last hymn to summer on thin branches of an empty tree, nor grass, sodden and bent beneath winter's first rain-heavy snow. Leave-taking is not the sun reluctant to smile in a lowering sky, nor the moon taking leave of the stars at dawn one by one. Leave-taking is not the wind suddenly hushed in the rocking cradle of trees, nor the waves stunned and dazed, staring glassy-eyed after the parting storm. Leave-taking is not birds, grass, sun, moon, wind or waves for these will all come again. Will you.
Elaine Christensen
STILLBORN Still, with milk my breasts Still, with love my arms Still, at night I rock Still, so still my tears Still, with pain my womb Still, with God my child.
Elaine Christensen
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