BY LIZZIE HUTTON
At 28 I saw that my flat flowered ring had cracked.
At 35: spring’s slaughter house. The old
stone house, its wild kept food.
They told me it was made of rose gold, how I liked
the name. Furred poppy stems and jagged leaves
persisting from the white-washed cracks.
That “rose” more real to me than just plain
gold, although the jewelers told me—
weeds, they nodded in their place
Their open-faced red heads—that mine was of a type
once common, inexpensive. My boy glued there
to see the baby pigs released, swell down the hill
To forage on their short blunt freckled legs for fallen nuts.
A “cigar ring” they called it, made of giant
sheets of heated gold.
Even so, the sloping pebbled road was beautiful
at night. The wallpaper designs were rolled on
in repeating frames. I couldn’t tell, though, if
Their squeals were greedy grunts or pained—then
machine-sliced and cut to size, formed into rings
and put to harden—even wondered if it was themselves
They ever ate—like cannoli shells on slender tubes,
my-finger-shaped. Oh stacks of small mid-whistle mouths,
lustrous with emotion.
Yet, despite the gold’s patrician name—it didn’t matter
to my boy, he held the chain-link, mesmerized
by the pigs’ crowded pink and brown
Coming and going—the ring’s flowers were conventional,
four-petaled, but for some shut buds,
their tips pointed like tears’.
Now I no longer wear it but I loved it once, I loved
the color’s melancholy blush and hairline
crack instead of brass. The road was beautiful
At night, sloped, pebbled, rimmed
with poppies, wild. And now I knew the way
I ought to call it. Though I had a boy—
And in the daylight, also, truth be told—
a boy who loved the world
the more for ignorance of all its names.
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LIZZIE HUTTON’s poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, Harvard Review, Antioch Review, and Interim, among other magazines, and her essays in the New England Review and Pleiades. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA, and she is working on a book on amnesia. Poet Mark Doty selected “Rose Gold and Poppies” as the winner of Sycamore Review’s 2009 Wabash Prize for Poetry. The poem was published in Issue 22.1-Winter/Spring 2010.
