that step out onto the lawn after supper
and look up through the linden tree
still dense with waxy leaves. When summer sticks
like resin to the boy’s skin though schoolbags
again litter the hall. The breezy, open-window days
just before cancer. Days when the teenage daughter
forgets to smoulder with some primal anger
and the fridge, fixed, hums yummily in the corner
keeping the celery crisp, the milk very cold.
Weekdays of mashed potatoes, frozen peas
and grocery-store roast chicken. Easy days,
though we strive and strive, going on about
anniversary trips and where did the romance go.
Such dear days, like lunching grandmothers. Or even
sweeter, harder. Lined up in all their stunning
uneventfulness, jams sparkling in the larder.
Deanna Young is the author of The Still Before a Storm (Moonstone Press, 1984) and Drunkard’s Path (Gaspereau Press, 2001). Brick Books will publish House Dreams, her third collection of poems, in 2014. Her work has appeared recently in ARC and The Malhat Review, and in 2013 won the Grand Prize in the PRISM International Poetry Contest. She lives in Ottawa, where she is artistic co-director of the Tree Reading Series.
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