Dear Emily,

Your words rest
in quiet proof
of an unfettered life.

Spared public shame
and private scorn,
never heralded: wife.

Not from your father
forced to cringe
from a stranger's touch,

Nor be belle
of any ball.

Life, for you, lay undefined,
waiting for your pen.

In your words lay
humble truths and
worlds yet unexplored,

a testament to
freedom, neither
cherished nor deplored.

No expectations
nor demands, no
pedestal from
which to fall--

One doesn't have
to have seen much
to have seen it all.

Growth

I remember a white dress with red satin trim
dirt caked under my fingernails, between my toes.
I was three, and you were explaining
to me why I couldn't plant an apple tree
in Florida.  I couldn't understand how a place
good for growing so many other trees
couldn't grow apples.  I dropped the core,
seeds and all, into the earth, in defiance of you,
and of nature.  I dropped it in a cold corner
near the front of the house, and sat above that spot
all summer, sucking ixora nectar
as I waited.
No apples grew out of the earth
that fall, but that core took me into the ground,
showing me the secret to growing things unseen.