AT AN LA WEDDING
SAMUEL HOVDA
I drawl the rural myths:
hand-planted an acre of ginseng,
my late father forced me
to the basement, to steep bags of fruit.
The bridesmaids look at me as one
examines a foreign text,
can kind of see a syntax.
All that Minnesota, dust
on my family’s antique cruets.
But here, every purgatorial noon.
Six-lane highways, jammed
fingers. And I glimmer
like a dusty book in sunlight,
like the remembered dead.
∘∘∘