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Not That Happiness
Not bluebirds nesting in a wooden box nailed to your picket fence. No geraniums in the planter, but yarrow where the trees begin, hawkweed in a clearing near the black locust and loosestrife—how you are helpless against its beauty—everywhere along the creek. No friends anymore who ask about dinner, but a boy who woke last week, singing counterpoint to the wrens. To read, We are without consolation or excuse, and remember a sack of peaches from a roadside stand; hunger the day you stopped for them. Maxine Sullivan singing “Blue Skies.” In winter, lullabies sung for the dead. The shoulder roast simmering in red wine with potatoes and sweet onions on a day when the rain begins; your heart sliding toward the sinkhole of November. Who is not captive to some small happiness? To love a field you can never own—the pink mist of knapweed, the blue of chicory. Or the heron that settles in the neighbor’s pond and croaks through the last of your dreams. You startle awake, patting your head, glad that you are not a minnow, darting among the muddy reeds. How it comes around, this happiness, like a landlord sniffing out the rent. Not what you ordered—pennywhistles, cellophane hats, those hand-crank noisemakers—but the happiness that finds you, scrawls a receipt, says, “You paid for this,” whatever happiness is.
Greg Rappleye
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:hi:
RL
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