The good thing
/Rose Auslander
As I head past sixty-six, I practice saying hello goodbye. The good thing is, it doesn’t take long if you don’t think about it & who has time. The good thing is when you say it, the sun looks like the moon floating silver behind the clouds & the moon never sets, gliding slowly all day long for the next sixty-six years & hey, maybe we’ll be happy. We’ll go on picnics every day. Hair shimmering in sterling light, we’ll unpack our hamper, spread gingham napkins on our laps, eat my mom’s deviled eggs & your mom’s potato salad & wash it down with the vodka my grandpa carried from Russia for luck. Sitting there on sea-soaked rocks, swallowing the last drops of liquid fire, eyes almost closed, we’ll wave at kids casting their lines past the jetty. Not taking time to recognize ourselves gliding past goodbye, we’ll say hello.
photo credit: Liz Hanellin
Rose Auslander lives on Cape Cod. Obsessed with water and poetry (not necessarily in that order), she’s written the book Wild Water Child, chapbooks Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus, and poems in Berkeley Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, RHINO, Rumble Fish, Tinderbox, and Tupelo Quarterly.
