The Lime Orchard Woman

1 As she grows to twelve, her body begins Its Spring, its hike along the trail In the mountains that open Suddenly to show a whole valley So surprising one forgets For the moment to breathe. Her hips, and so her walk, Her breasts, and so The way she begins to see How other people look at her, How they are caught mid-breath, and shy. But the day a train first came here, They look at her like that: No one staring at her face, no one Noting a moustache curling up Like the arms of the bald He-man posing in the traveling circus There on the face of the engineer. She gets angry, steam in her head The way the engine had Barely held in, almost bursting. Angry in the manner that a person might Take an egg and hold it too hard. Her breasts begin to grow, And she gets angry. Or, she gets angry, So her breasts begin to grow. She cannot remember exactly which. Her mother had told her This would come, But told her so quickly, so much In a hurry and in a small room, And with the other things, She neglected to say that also They would stop growing, So they might not. She would have to wear— She learns this in a dream— High heels backward on her feet To keep a symmetry of balance. The angrier she gets through the months, The more worried she feels At the silliness of how She has begun to grow two new shoulders, Of how she will have to wear her shoes, As bigger, one centimeter at a time, She sprouts out like buds, at first, Like fast plants, Then, like the trees, And finally unstoppable In their season: fruit. The future, she reasons, cannot be good. 2 At 28, she has forgotten what is past. She sits and watches now her thighs Flowing out like the broad Varicosed backs of alligators She has seen in moving pictures, Pushed out around the metal Edges of the lawn chair. Long and flat animals, Sated and full of wrinkling Ridges, held as if by small bones The way camping tents are suspended, All from having eaten Too many pigs, too many birds and cows In the summers of her middle Years of crying When she was all mouth and chewing To feel better, all without boys, No Pedro of her own And now the boys cannot Come close, dare not Dare the alligators Which might come after them. 3 But no. This is an exaggeration, This sadness At het self. Sadness is like that, Adding weight to a thing, to legs The way legs look as one sits In a chair relaxed, Or on the edge of a wall. As if one were a circus performer With a partner, Ramón, Ramón standing Feet planted this moment precisely On the thighs. But no. This is a further exaggeration. Sadness again is like that, It learns you, she thinks, Makes you heavy in those places exactly You have dared think to be strong. On Thursday the 8th of this month Miguel her husband left her, But in that odd physics of how distance Increased every step she took Away from him. As she left the house, he got farther. As she, his María, walked out the door He left her, and the more she walked The farther he got, and smaller. She had learned him as one learns A pair of good leather shoes. She loved him so much She stopped thinking about him. He was like breathing. So that when sadness called, she went To see what it wanted And did not worry. Sadness, again, is like that, Not telling a person the whole story. 4 The orchard was his passion now More than women, More than hard words and fast guns In the hands of other men. And he tended his trees with fingers He might have used touching The hair of his young cousin, lovely Marta, his wife, light skinned, Eyes the color in the moss And barks of his trees, Who walked to the river and stayed. Fingers that might have Pointed out to her with care The beaten line a trail made Leading to his house, their house. But he was busy growing the limes So that her hair was like a bramble Having to be torn away Hard from her, leaving the blood.