Opals

—for Tamar Craig

I knew the hard winter of sapphires

set within gold claws,

amber and pipestone strung on gut,

fringed pouches stuffed with hash.

Separate, separate, I urged her

that summer of Woodstock,

when I lied to get the car

and draped my love beads

around the neck of someone else’s sister.

In a hayloft in Ohio

my friend lifted three bales

to show me a litter of week-old kittens,

each pair of eyes infected with a slimy mucus.

Their pupils swam in opaque opal membranes

and they would have gone blind

if she had not pulled an eyedropper

of antibiotics from her jacket,

doing what the mother cat

could not do, what the owners

would not trouble themselves to do,

doing what a sister or friend

might do if she took the time

to attend the wayward, opalescent

unhappiness in this world.

Copyright Credit: “Opals” from All-American Girl by Robin Becker © 1996. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: All-American Girl (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)