This Side Of Paradise

Black-haired Mawmaw Reenie, born six weeks
after Zelda Sayre, by twenty twice
a mother, babies got on feather bed
and straw tick while somewhere Zelda danced
a Charleston with Fitzgerald, drunk on hooch,
in love with speed, fired by internal combustion.

While Zelda studied Matisse on Capri,
Reenie gleaned fresh beds behind the steam
thresher that came each year when wheat was ripe
along the Brissey road. She stuffed the sweet,
rough straw into striped cotton, fingers chapped,
dust streaking gray into her sweaty hair.

Did Zelda, in that Asheville madhouse, mix
her paints while I watched Mawmaw use a broom
to smooth her feather bed, then tuck the quilt
with mitered corners? Whispers that she messed
those feathers up again with that bachelor
who lived in the big house down the road.

That old Brissey Dirt Road dead-ends now.
The homeplace burned in nineteen sixty-eight,
but Reenie had been gone a dozen years.
I see her in a photograph I found,
unsmiling in a drop-waist dress. No telling
how the roaring twenties roared through here.