Wendy Mnookin: Celebration

I’ll fill my wedding vase

with deep-veined lilies, harlot asters,

pollen will dust the table

where I mass them every week. I’ll gift myself

with all the books I left on bookstore shelves

insisting I had no room

for more. I’ll give away

clothes, everything beige

and gray—from now on

it’s crimson, teal blue, I’ll be known

for my chiffon scarves. I’ll have

twenty people for dinner

and make roast duck with cherries

even though the recipe has verbs

like deglaze and julienne.

I’ll grow my hair to my waist,

wear hammered-silver earrings.

If my son buys drugs on every corner,

if his face grows gaunt

and the bones on his wrist

seem too fragile for the weight of a hand,

I will learn French,

I will spend a month walking

through small country villages in Bordeaux,

stopping each evening for wine, a meal.

Copyright 1991 Wendy Mnookin. First published in To Get Here (BOA, 1991).

Wendy Mnookin’s books include Dinner with Emerson (Tiger Bark, 2016). She lives with her husband in Newton, Massachusetts, where they raised their three children.