What is on your clothesline?
My red pajamas,
my mother’s blue shawl,
jittering with wind,
wild as jazz, clean as a storm.
Where did you walk this morning?
To the old meadow
for thimbleberries.
What are they like?
Lemon velvet.
Not sweet.
But who cannot love them,
profuse after rain,
leaves like a child’s hands,
their redness redder
than raspberries?
I cup them, let their juice
run through white cloth,
spoon myself a few,
lick my fingers, my lips,
boil the jam, pour into starry jars,
line them up on the sill,
transparent.
What do they look like?
Lighthouses
beaming, warning.
Where were you last night?
At a wedding in the meadow,
thimbleberries rambling
their fragrance.
I wore a dress I once steeped
in their leaves.
I can still smell
the green in the linen.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Nancy Takacs’s poetry awards include The Juniper Prize, the 2018 and 2016 15 Bytes Book Award, Weber’s Sherwin W. Howard Award, a Pushcart Prize, and runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her latest book is Dearest Water. She is the author of three other books of poetry and four chapbooks. Nancy lives most of the year in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in a small cabin with her husband, poet Jan Minich. Nancy is the inaugural poet laureate of Utah’s art hub: Helper City.
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