Sage

[Valerie Please]

Sage
The smell of my 
         grandmother’s kitchen…

With her 
               in a polyester house dress,
         her skin as soft 
                as the gown’s 
                        colors were bright.
         Her salt and pepper curls
                         in gold hairpins.

         Her sing-songy yodel
a jumble of
                 mountain stream ramblings,
as vivid flashes 
      of her silly youth
                 tumbled like
                 socks from the dryer
       in her mind’s eye, 
not registering 
                  the view 
                          of the backyard.

“Oh!” 
            She’d suddenly start
                  “I must have been
                                                 a million miles away”

The warm tomatoes
      paid her no mind.
They kept on ripening
          in her sunny window.