Maxine Kumin

The week in August you come home, adult, professional, aloof, we roast and carve the fatted calf —in our case home-grown pig, the chine garlicked and crisped, the applesauce hand-pressed. Hand-pressed the greengage wine. Nothing is cost-effective here. The peas, the beets, the lettuces hand sown, are raised to stand apart. The electric fence ticks like the slow heart of something we fed and bedded for a year, then killed with kindness’s one bullet and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering. In winter we lure the birds with suet, thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat. Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring of wire that keeps the raccoons from the corn to the gouged pine table that we lounge around, distressed before any of you was born. Benign and dozy from our gluttonies, the candles down to stubs, defenses down, love leaking out unguarded the way juice dribbles from the fence when grounded by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe, how eloquent, how beautiful you seem! Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow, ballooning to overfill our space, the almost-parents of your parents now. So briefly having you back to measure us is harder than having let you go.

Afterward, the compromise. Bodies resume their boundaries. These legs, for instance, mine. Your arms take you back in. Spoons of our fingers, lips admit their ownership. The bedding yawns, a door blows aimlessly ajar and overhead, a plane singsongs coming down. Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the self lay lightly down, and slept.