(written in 1978 on Spring Break with my friend Helena. We visited Mount Vernon and Gunston Hall both in Northern Virginia)
by Susan Fox
Helena and
I
climb up
towards
Martha and
George;
crocuses
peer at us
from newly
unfrozen ground;
spring
announcing the summer,
trumpets
through the trees
and we are
weeping for their lives together:
“A
Victorian marriage,”
you say,
“with all
its respect
and male
prerogatives.”
In passing
the master bedroom,
we wonder
“Were they happy together?”
We stop
giggling at the tomb;
the parents
of our country
lie
side-by-side
in death,
if not in life;
the secret
of their lives is buried there
and nothing
is revealed to us.
Later, at
Gunston Hall,
after a
pony ride,
we would be
ladies too,
strolling
only on a manicured lawn,
wearing a
long white dress,
sewing,
writing,
waiting to
be married.
Look out on
the Chesapeake,
Helena, the
wind brings in another sail,
and time
beaches us at Mount Vernon
where we
can forget our careers,
pretend to
be girls, unburdened and genteel.
But we are
not ladies, we are working women,
running
through our lives
in heels,
with notepads –
Only once
do we glance back down the Potomac
to see what
might have been:
two young
girls, one dark, one blond
strolling
through a formal garden
at ease in
their own gentle living.
Helena in
life there is only time,
if we can
find it.
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| The Potomac River |
