We Could Live There, Christina, by Jeffrey Skinner

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1948

We Could Live There, Christina
 
 You have gone out a little way in the field
letting a slice of night between us.
Still, we are stitched 
together like a peasant blouse, 
yellow flowers embroidered, 
your scent inside.
I don’t blame the slice of night.  
I don’t blame you.  
There is nothing to blame.  
When morning comes
I want to wake like a children’s drawing
To the sun’s yellow spikes,
grass a careless quiver of green 
slashes, house with 
chimney and smoke, a brown dog, maybe, 
melting into the grass.  
How beautiful, this shattered world!  
I will pull you from that field into the house 
you drew, and we carried 
in unopened boxes 
all the way to today.  Or, I will lie down 
in the field next to you.
 
Jeffrey Skinner

​Jeffrey Skinner’s most recent book of poems, Sober Ghost, appeared in June, 2024.  His Selected will appear in 2026.  In 2014 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and in 2015 was given an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for literature.  His recent work has appeared in The North American Review, Image, Volt, and Fence.