She laughed telling me the story:
How the doctor said his hair
Had a premonition as it stood
From his scalp. The unnatural click
through the forceps warned him
Before she appeared, mewling,
With a boney nub above each temple.

Inoperable they said,
Rooted too near the grey quivering lobes
Of her personality.
So once a year, it was off
To the surgeon for a reduction.
They were not wealthy.
I remember at one sleep over
She was beginning again
To wear her braids far forward
And I heard her father, drunk downstairs,
Bellowing like a white bull
Something about a belt sander.
She spent much of grade school
With a corner of her bottom lip
Tucked between her teeth.

Rodeo was not a popular sport.
She wore a silver buckle
And the clop-clop of her boot heels
Accompanied me till middle school.
One Saturday I watched her
Watch a man stomped to death.
Her face in the morning's yellow light
Reminded me of the pastor's hand
On my mouth, the baptismal water,
The wavering light between me and life,
And the sensation of upward movement.

Middle school with horns.
The types of boys interested in horns.
First sex.

She was class president,
And lettered in track.
Her husband followed her home
From college and her gardenias
Were gorgeous. She drank
No more than two at parties.

She didn't notice when I woke.
The faint smell of chlorine mixed
With sweet mown grass,
And a tortured light reflected
Across her smiling face
From where our daughters churned
The water, racing laps.
With my deckchair so close beside hers,
I heard the tap, tap, tap.
I saw, past the sweating lemonade,
The thick gleam of blood in her hair
As her wet nails
Dug an unsteady rhythm
Around one swollen reminder there.

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