She’s a widow, must be, look at her in the fields,
tossing seed, pushing a plow, staring at the sky
in hope of rain, and the kids, three of them,
tossing rocks at birds, splashing in the pump water,
no man, you can tell just by looking at her, no man.
No tractor, a man would get the tractor started,
a man would be happy to be out of the house
hands deep in grease, under the hood fiddling with
wires and screws, but a widow takes the house
with her when she leaves it, look at her, in the middle
of that runty corn, like she’s standing in her bedroom
staring at the empty bed, or in the bathroom sniffing
for that man smell.
So what do we call her, the Widow…take your pick,
one man got his head crushed in a drunken brawl,
another slid off the bridge and drowned, a third
just said, fuck this, I’m leaving…and that’s a kind of
death isn’t it, though without the wake, without
the bother of another funeral in these parts.
And kids yelling, screaming, a man would beat the
silence into them, he’d have them working, he’d
have them out of school the day that they were
old enough so he could brag how he never did get
past the seventh grade.
She’s a widow, thinking she can tame the land,
when it takes a man’s muscle, a man’s fist slammed
into a wall when the drought lingers, a man’s thirst,
a man’s stumble into the house long past midnight,
red-faced, cursing, tossing furniture around,
beating up on the nearest woman while the kids
cower in their room.
And the bandage around her wrist, how did that happen,
cut it sharpening a blade, what kind of woman sharpens
a blade in this part of the country, most faint at the
sight of blood, she’s done her fainting when she lost
her husband, you can tell, she’s a widow,
otherwise she’d be all bruises, not just wounds.