for Marianne Boruch
By a Chicago lake, in a Chicago summer,
1962 or 63, and she twelve or thirteen,
I think, she’d only said that she was young,
she spent the summer with a group of girls,
sleeping in tents, studying
different kinds of pines—
White Pine, for example, five needles
in each bundle, one needle
for each letter in its name—
and from June to September, she said, they kept
the same fire going, each girl learning
when it needed dry wood or green wood—
no one could leave that spot by the lake for long.
She would understand
how my friends and I carried the man we found
together, the forty pounds of him
inside the white bag the sheriff brought,
the white of the bag showing the way
through the dark. And the mountains,
the thin grass in the desert
like hair that had fallen out
and then like grass, Border Patrol trucks
on the far side of the mountains,
their light coming to meet his light.
from RestFind more by Margaree Little at the library
Copyright © 2018 Margaree Little
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.