Salt Hill
By Jane Springer
I was born in a Tennessee sanatorium hours after my mother’s father died & I know
how the womb becomes a salt-sea grave.
I was born in the last seconds of small crops & small change rained down on the
collection plate’s felt palate & I know
the soul’s barn debt to past generations, too.
Outside, ditchfuls of chicory flashed in the after-rain sun as melancholia’s purple
scent rose & its steepled fog distilled in Tennessee hills.
& I know I’m not supposed to be here on account of all those crazy aunts & I know
great grandma was five
when her Cherokee mother died & her daddy dumped her on the red clay curb
of an Arkansas reservation then drove away in a wagon—
how she just strode the fields of milkweed back to Tennessee & married her cousin.
When I was five I drowned a fly in a piepan of water then spooned it out & heaped
a hill of salt on its still body until I could hear a buzz again (as if within a belly)
& I know the rush of the resurrected.
I was born in the last decade of small town girls wearing white gloves to funerals.
As an infant my boy quit suckling long enough to wave to my mother’s ghost—
who used to drift in the doorway of the hours.
& at three he told me at my age he had red hair & broke his neck falling off
a runaway horse—I know
the rocking chair’s set too close to the edge of the porch.
