My grandmother wore the coal oil lamp
high and close to her head like a tribal
ornament when she lasered us out and down
to the cellar mounding up in the brown land
near the garden, all the way down to air
like a splash of lake water, and the thud
of blackness when she planked the door
behind us and the light shuddered out
for a moment in the cold. We all went
uninvited and our imaginations were our own.
There might be a black widow webbed and barely
cornered somewhere, or salamanders splayed
on the walls getting their fill of roots
and dankness; but if the potato sacks were full
enough to lift us one by one to the high places,
we saw blue enamel rimmed with yellow cream
and peaches rising like ripe suns in an orchard
of green glass jars. Or the darkness would yield
peas to crack and roll in the palm, and apples
carried in the curve of the arm to a kitchen
laid with squares of red and white linoleum
like flags waving us home to a cookstove
hotter than August and ready to bake, if we
made it back after the flinging of the door
on earth again, the arrowing of full light
like waking up, the epiphany of silver hair
bobbing ahead, and the bolting of brown faces
and legs, the growing up like summer’s crop
of all of us from the deep loam of a mostly safe life.
Dawn Baker Brimley
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