What Kind of Woman

by Kate Baer

When you emerge with crystals in one hand, revenge in the other, remember the humble barn swallow who returns in spring. If not for her markings, another bird entirely.

(Did you know when you bait a deer it’s called a violation, but when you poison a girl it’s called a date.)

You do not have to choose one or the other: a dream or a dreamer, the bird or the birder. You may be a woman of commotion and quiet. Magic and brain.

I loved him more than anyone has ever loved, and still I cut him open, held his heart to his throat. (When I am buried, tell him that the only thing I meant to do was live.)

When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands. Little by little, mountains are climbed.

I don’t know how we manage our ordinary lives when we’re this close to the death in dying go ahead and tell me otherwise go ahead and tell me something good

At any given moment there is someone getting what they always wanted. I know no quicker way to ruin a day than to dwell on this.

Some nights she walks out to the driveway where the lilacs bloom and lies down on the warm pavement even though the neighbors will see and wonder what kind of woman does such things.

When I took you as a husband I did not know the deaths our love would suffer. I did not know the graves of loneliness. Last week when you asked if I ever thought of leaving, I said no, even though what I meant was that I love the feel of your hands in the morning. That even in our darkest hours, I still wait for the sound of your feet at the door.

What he doesn’t know is how much the touch of his baby’s skin or the way his mother forms his favorite pie, thinking about the morning he was born, is all a verse. A covert melody.

She walked into motherhood in the low light of morning. Now she sits at its feet in the dark and weeps.

Maybe he is just a man walking or maybe he is searching for a bird to break. How many have already been broken?