Wyoming

The rugs are hanging in the hemlocks. They were gifts her husband sent from Wyoming. He mailed them after he moved West for the brown trout and for the snow. She watches the fringe threads move in the wind. The marbled sky seems a bruised color. She wonders when it will rain. The rugs are decorated in patterns of birds. The starlings’ wings are faded and gray.

They’d never bothered with a divorce. She kept his last name. Someone told her years ago he was living with a writer who’d been his student. She thinks the poets in Wyoming must be beautiful.

The hemlocks are quiet. Wind moves through the house and disturbs the pages of a book resting on the arm of the couch. She rarely shuts the windows. She knows the branches in Wyoming are already shouldered in snow. It had been a cold autumn in Tennessee.

The book on the couch is a history of silkworms. The eggs, she learned, are delicate. Ancient farmers incubated them in folded sheets of parchment, tucked against the warm skin of their breasts. She imagines a room in Wyoming. Moths fluttering toward dim lamplight. Before dawn. The young poet asleep beside her husband, thin paper unfolded across her bare chest.

She watches a stray dog cross the yard and sniff the hems of the rugs. She remembers spilling wine there once and the man she was dating then knelt with a towel. He cooked fish he claimed to have caught. Later, she watched him clean the skillet with his fingers. The water steamed in the sink. His hands were warm when he unfastened her necklace.

The rugs are inexpensive and difficult to clean. She never leaves them in the same room for more than a few years at a time. She likes the way they feel beneath her bare feet. In the summer she sometimes takes the smallest rug to the river, spreads it in the afternoon grass near the water. She sleeps or eats and writes poems she sends to her husband. He always returns them with passages underlined, words crossed out. He published some in a journal he edits. She has a copy somewhere with a picture of leaves caught in a barbed wire fence printed on the cover.

The rain wakes her late in the night. She listens to the sound of it on the tin roof. She knows the windowsills will be wet in the morning. She wonders where the stray dog hides in the weather. She thinks of a line for a poem about animals in the crawlspace licking the rusty pipes. In the morning she forgets it.

The rugs are heavy with rain and she leaves them outside. Water rises between her toes when she walks barefoot back to the house. The sound of her feet across the hardwood floors surprises her. Her damp footprints through the rooms. The sky is clear. The stray dog hasn’t come back. Wyoming is a far way away.

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