Raspberries in June

He asks me to come by, read her some of my garden poems at four o’clock. June sun will be high and hot through the windows in her hospital room. She may sleep. The surgeons opened up her abdomen from stern to pubes and poked through the curves, bends, folds and hiding places to scoop out tumors – snowflake cells that threatened to roll up and adhere into snowmen. They snipped out part of her small intestine, her uterus and speckled-egg ovaries. They sluiced her gut down with a warm chemo bath. Two surgeons to sew her together. One stitched. One stapled. Outside bedsheets dry in half an hour on the line in the long solstice day. The redbud’s heart-leaves bathe in sunshine. To hell with snowmen. I can’t decide whether to tell her how sweet the raspberries are today.

the spider’s web
ravels, torn open
in the sprinkler’s blast

—

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who is watching summer come on very slowly. Her poetry tends often toward eco-poetry but this poem remembers a dear friend in a June a few years ago.