The Arrival

 

Grandma’s wool coat, navy blue, long and plush,

covered her ample bust and slender calf muscles

completely.

 

And when she stepped off the train in Portland

for her annual month-long visit,

 

(she placed not one lick of trust in a flimsy aeroplane)

 

first, her sweet radiant smile coaxed the four of us  

to race across the rail station’s massive polished

floor, then that coat’s strange beguiling smell, so

wondrously intoxicating, quenched our childhood

 thirst like a thousand pink rose petals stashed away

upstairs, hidden underneath a folded quilt in her

Wisconsin farmhouse attic for all those many years.