Carol Lynn Grellas
He will remember her orchard, teeming
with cherry tomatoes, plumped full of juice,
like scarlet ornaments lit from the sun
draping the trellis on long meandering stems,
all but one, fallen beyond the room
of her clapboard house on a Sunday afternoon.
He will remember her candles, paled
and cold near pieta plaques that lined the walls
above old-fashioned wainscot and bleached
wood floors, where she used to sing
and brew Greek coffee from a bottomless
pot that she doesn’t pour on a Sunday afternoon.
He will remember her aged hands carefully
carving the pulpy flesh of vegetables flushed
and sweet; our countless feasts that she prepared
in her tartan tied apron, this unkempt room,
these past due bills, an empty seat by
a windowsill where we used to meet
on a Sunday afternoon.
He will remember her nervous smile, an unmoving
ribcage, the molded outline in embryo form
within the mattress tattered and worn─ a lasting image
that snuck in his being as subtly as incense or the
scent
of Livani in the Orthodox Church while inhaling
the sounds during rounds of the Byzantine Choir
on a Sunday afternoon .
He will remember her kitchen neglected
and bare with a view of overgrown greens
everywhere and her table of knotty pine,
the ripened tomatoes, unpicked and still
on the vine, his sip of ouzo to say goodbye
toasting her name with no reply
on a Sunday afternoon.