Three Poems by Rachel Trousdale

Life Insurance

                             ads look like this;
also detergent, nineteen-sixties politicians,
investment firms; there in the golden field
is our golden-haired daughter, milkweed
spiraling in the updraft about her. Beauty
in beauty, intent on the peculiar lightness
of the seeds. When our son was born,
I said, well, now I guess I can’t
kill myself. Then our daughter, and I said,
I don’t even want to. Those featherlike
bubblelike comas, the parachutes
that waft beyond sight in the field,
brighter than fairy glitter
on store-bought gauze wings. She’s between
us and the sun; we can’t look directly,
the camera can’t fathom, it is all
sparkle and float. Farther and farther,
to the trees lining the meadow, to plant
those tough-stalked weeds that propel
butterflies—don’t touch them, their wings
will dust off on your hands—thousands of windy miles.

*

Someone Should Teach You Better Manners

You greedy bastard, Death, always
reaching for the next cookie on the plate. Leave
some for the rest of us—you’ve just
had a whole woman; washed her down
with a few children. Where do you think you’re going
to put that birch sprawled in the lake? How
can you fit a hummingbird, an ant,
the clippings from my fingernails
into your craw? Keep your hands
to yourself; let someone else have a bite
of the last fifty minutes of this gasping year.
To hell with you, and your determination
to spoil a nice evening. No matter what
you do next, we were off flying kites—
an upward tug, exaltation, vanishing
into blue—the day the house burned down.

*

Mammogram

To hell with Mithridates, and that killjoy ant. Today
I’m stockpiling happiness, gorging on sun
like a grizzly on salmon. There isn’t any hope
like my hope: I’m the only expert, the testator.
All of you listen: it doesn’t matter that the most beautiful
walk you know is through the graveyard. You can ignore
the stones. Climb them like the children’s play towers. Who cares
what’s under that golden carpet of ginkgo leaves? If
you don’t already know you’re going to die, there’s nothing
I can tell you; listen; that’s the sound of jackhammers
as six men in hard hats build my children a library.
On the way home from the hospital I’ll stop
to buy muhammara, coffee, earthquake cookies.
I’m waiting my turn, stuck behind a van that delivers
new glass for windows, on my way to the place
I delivered two babies. It takes what it takes.
There’s no news you can give me that changes the light.

*

Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, and Diagram, among other places. Her first book of poetry, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, was selected by Robert Pinsky for the Cardinal Poetry Prize and will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025.