by Mary Buchinger

I’m thinking of their marriage and who can say it was happy
so many days, months, hours together and they were so young
what made them marry in the first place was a moment
of desire and so a sixty-five year marriage was conceived—
the community knew this, never was it spoken of, and this
silence imposed a frame for understanding human behavior
for the child making sense of what is visible and invisible,
what is felt, and how it’s known  So now I must question
my mythology, my understanding of what happiness looks like
The world becomes known through conveyance of meaning
the child learning also what’s not said out loud—
And sometimes the world is like the sky today, scrubbed
of clouds, relentless blue, unyielding, uninformative blue,
nothing like the fossils I love that keep and tell of a different
time, a different air (is that what childhood is?)
Every new day, every new life promises beauty,
and the thing about promises is they reveal in themselves
something breakable  I am my father’s daughter
(Was he sad? Was he sad?) What falls apart comes back
stronger   this is a kind of rule and it’s also true a fossil
resists my prying fingers, I can cradle it in my hand,
examine its imprint, I cannot break it open

Mary Buchinger is the author of eight poetry collections including There Is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated, which received the Paul Nemser Book Prize Honorable Mention, and Navigating the Reach, which won the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award Honors. Mary teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and is a member of Slate Roof Press. Her poetry appears in AGNI, Nimrod, On the Seawall, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. Read more of Mary’s work at www.MaryBuchinger.com