Poetry Thursday

Tariff

It takes time to appreciate how I once
made a friend so unhappy the next night
on the road from Chauncey to Amesville, Ohio,
she steered her Fiat Spider head on
into an on-coming truck. Her boyfriend
identified her waitress uniform.
She's been dead now for more than twenty years.
What I did to hurt her I won't tell you -
so you're free to imagine any vicious,
self-indulgent, hapless blunder or crime

while I go about turning this into a poem again,
turning over heavy marl, the garden
in spring, and the wind picks up, flinging soil
against my neck, behind my ears, into my teeth.
You have to get dirty: what appreciate
means is to price. After living a while
you understand the ways you have to pay.

-Michelle Boisseau