Elegy with Fourteen Coats by Sally Rosen Kindred

Some night, years after her last winter, you open

both cold eyes in the dark and see

her coats, the green wool and the pea coat

and the navy, the swing-coat and the swagger, piles

of the coats that once wore your

grandmother’s body, their hard princess buttons

and cuffs, the way they held

her velvet shoulders and somehow their cottons

and their tweed pleats. And though you

can’t touch the lace or gabardine 

or know what moon or ocean

holds their scarlet breath, the gold linings

know she was born, the pockets mean

she had hands and the word coat

means you had a grandmother, the word

ice means one cold spring she woke

and squeezed you some lemonade and the seed

rolled around in the bottom of the glass

when you set it down, 1978, you’re 

sure of it, and that seed

came from a fruit heavy and bright    

as your grandmother’s mouth. Her name 

was Hazel. Which here in the dark means protection

and peace, and a wand of hazel is hard 

but pliant, a catkin hangs from the branch

in February, month she was born,

and somewhere right now a branch of hazel sits

propped in a vase and your grandmother

is twenty and a little cold

in the hall after the party and someone brings

her navy coat from the rack

and she shoulders it on, laughing,

and her laughter is low and gold, real

as this dark and you’re a seed rolling

inside it, and now you’re both

warm, now you can close your winter eyes and sleep. 

Sally Rosen Kindred’s third poetry collection is Where the Wolf, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches poetry writing online at The Poetry Barn. 

25 October 2021