Poetry by Daniel Brown

by Daniel Brown

Lucy

Her eyes of sapphire blue
Challenge you under quizzical brows.
Like a Vermont wildflower,
She was tough and unspoiled.
Plucked,
She might fail to survive.
The girl from those green hills
Wanted to try art school.
She was our daily server
At an elegant small mountain resort.
I helped her to get in.

To Philadelphia she went,
Talented and brave.
Urban life was new for her;
She believed that she’d fled
Those small rural Vermont towns.

She sent us letters and cards.
But after six months,
There was naught but silence.

The next card came from Colorado
Whence she’d fled the city and the school.
Please, she wrote,
Don’t be angry with me;
I have disappointed you.
But I am, yet again, free.
We lost track; there were moves
And illnesses and a divorce.

Ten years later, I returned to Vermont.
A student of mine got me there
As I could no longer travel alone.
We went for a meal the night we arrived,
I, tired but relieved
To be home again, in those mountains I love.
The hostess seated us, menus in hand.
I sit and look
At those sapphire blue eyes
Under those same quizzical brows.

Lucy?  I said,
Is that you?
It’s Mr. Brown, from Ohio.

Oh, my God, she says
Tears forming in those splendid eyes.
Are you all right, are you all right?
Yes, I say , crying myself,
I am all right.

John and I came home
From Colorado to Vermont.
Our farm here is self-sufficient.
I have two children
And I loved coming back.

Are you happy, I ask.
Oh, sure, she says.
But how can I help you?
Do you want to move in
With John and me?

Although lines crossed and creased
That remarkable face
And though she no longer drew,
She combined azure and sapphire and lapus
Into the woman she’d become.