photo by: Radiann Porter, "Miss Opie's Agave"

Ode To Miss Opie

After he died you didn't want to change a thing
so you didn't and stayed the slow hours
waiting to go yourself and we'd pay you a visit.
One eye snapped shut and sultry
wise minks so long in the closets,
an exact replica of the twenties and the same
thing that you were when you died at 98,
the oldest old-woman in town.
How to be a widow? How to be?
Not Kate Chopin but more like
the Cat in the Hat, all those weird things
on your credenzas, all the crystal lamps,
the bobby pins on your dresser
where we practiced counting.
A hundred salt and pepper shakers,
the collections of a young woman, depression glass.
Lorna called you Miss Dopie just to be mean
or funny, hard to tell,
all your orifices in moth balls anyway.
We laughed until we found you in your kitchen one day,
propped in a chair near the yellow clapboards
looking really poor like us, real hungry
and too blind to cook.
That last year me and Lorna baked you a birthday cake
and it was real pretty for a couple of kids.