Domesticity’s Bride

The air is leaden with heat. Purple wisteria quickens among the birthing globes of Lake Niagara grapes: draping the arbor, perfuming the air. The vines twine around the shaggy-cedar corner posts. Remnants of summer’s past ghost in the deep shade: beer mugs on five-penny nails hanging from cedar stanchions, broken seashell wind-chimes serenading. Carpenter bees hover above the coneflowers like pom-poms on a fifties crinoline. Dragonflies flit from orange, candy-colored daylilies.

a rope hammock
swings on the veranda:
a page turns

Forty years in residence, never have I permitted myself the pleasure of just lying here, cocooned within this nirvana of shade. August’s heat conjures: Grandma in her handmade flour-dusted apron, Pa in denim overalls. She serving him lunch. This space, which has nurtured decades of domesticity, now provides safe harbor for me.

the glasses
slip down my nose:
the sprinkler whirs

Deborah Guzzi is a healing facilitator specializing in Japanese Shiatsu and Reiki. She writes for Massage and Aromatherapy Magazines. She travels the world to expand her knowledge of healing and to seek writing inspiration. She has walked the Great Wall of China, seen Nepal (during the civil war), Japan, Egypt (two weeks before ‘The Arab Spring’), Peru, and France (during December’s terrorist attacks). Her poetry appears in magazines in the UK, Greece, the USA, and specifically in Existere in Canada, Tincture in Australia, and Cha:Asian Literary Review in China.