Prints

There are no footprints on the wet sand for her to follow.  A wisp of hair blowing, the stratus clouds, one shiny toenail.  Her hands and feet and legs are like her mom's, her stance and posture.
     There are broken shells like star constellations scattered on that wide wet plain.  She stands on her right foot.
     The western Levi jacket embroidered by Grandma for Dad fits loosely, arms too long.
     Is she crying or smiling?  It is difficult to tell.  Her eyebrows--dark, dusky.  Short shadow more recognizable than just having finished assertiveness training--lots of pockets in the cross-stitched designs--vaguely Indian. She's headed to the Warm Springs Rez in a few days to begin summer school teaching--a catch-up English class.  She fears she doesn't know what she's doing.  The students will present her with a necklace of dentalium shells strung through the handle of a tiny basket.  The basket, empty, that will worry her, big as a womb.  She won't have children--she will be lonely, missing Jerry, at one of the secretary's houses, an AA sponsor where she house-sits, sober and almost burnt down the house boiling water in a kettle that did not whistle.  Almost regretting her whole life--but seeing seven mountain peaks, all volcanic, smelling sage and healing and using the federal government phone line for free after classes.  How it turned out to be kind of easy--how she walked by fields of alfalfa and mint that summer and almost won the hot rod in the Fourth of July raffle there, that summer in Madras, in Eastern Oregon, her single life without Jerry after seven years and all through her master's degree and mom's cancer and her sisters getting married, having kids, all their friends getting hitched except for her.  How her feet never seemed big but there they are in the picture, long like her mom's.  Carrying her a bit further, getting more ideas as she went along, more imagining, more art and beauty landscape.  Everything bare.  I am so dark in dark blue.  I wear the same color now.