Love In The Ruins
You do not have to heal to be beautiful. In Italy, there is a woman happy and fat as a
clam herding her ducks with a stick while she squabbles with her neighbors about the
hole in the fence that has not been fixed. Meanwhile her husband chews his coffee
and daydreams about a woman he loved in the fifties. She must have been drunk, the
policeman decided, when she was struck by the train. Not knowing she laid down quietly
on the tracks, two girls growing in her like green beans. The surrounding trees hushing
them to sleep.