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.

∘∘∘