Marion Brown
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You blue-eyed the camera
and calculated quantities
to bake. You wanted berries
for muffins or a blue cake.
Scouring the bright field,
you leaned on your husband,
sky for a shawl.
(How thin you had grown;
how keenly you felt cold.)
I made too much of weather,
so I missed the cloud break,
you in the field, fingers ripe.
While you plucked berries,
pure blue slipped over your head.
Blue has an end.
A storm came and went,
clouds that dimmed summer—
summer not much to lose.
Marion Brown has had poems and reviews published in Barrow Street, Big City Lit, Kestrel, Poetry International, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is a lifelong New Yorker, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Columbia University, and a former Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardener. She has also worked on Wall Street. Her chapbook, Tasted, was published by Finishing Line Press this year.