Lost Recipe

Frank Stanford

The water boiling rabbits and onions
Fogs up the windows of my house:

Why does this old fat woman
Let me come around here,
Drawing long words on her glass.

A woodwind solo,
She keeps putting those empty blue bottles on her sill,
Living alone in the woods
Like a spayed stray.

She reads her twenty-pound bible
Full of secret ancestors
And the recipes of youth and luck,
While I lick plates
And grind out the ice cream.

When I open my closet
Dust blows in my washed hair.

Birds have nested in the cast iron.

That hook of hers, like a slab
Of cured bacon, words carved in meat
Smelling like hickory.

Water that is boiling to disinfect sickness
And scald hogs.

Water boiling in the locomotive,
Hauling its full cargo of death and soybeans,
Like windows bending in a storm.

A burning tree.

The matinee postponed due to lightning.
A long-lost cousin making good.

I buried the after- birth in the sawdust
On the floor of the barn.
And sometimes, when winter becomes
Such a deadly shot, I push away my supper.

Men go out at night, trying to sweep up the stars.

And women grow weary of the cold weather in their men.

They need a friend on the lake with a sailboat.
They need to take medicine and be alone.

Bad food and dead children are not forgotten.
They smell like cod liver oil
In a thimble on the fingers-
A fat lady in a housecoat
Walking through rooms with a cage,
Calling a bird.

Ginny Stanford