Page Sutton If I Loved a Poet

Page Sutton

If I Loved A Poet

When she sees green it’s never just green, is it? It always feels like it means something, doesn’t it?

It’s mid-april grass stains from dandelion-covered fields, smudged into silky white t-ball pants, soon turned dingy.

I’ve heard her say it’s the little sea glass dragonfly refracting diamond sunlight as it hangs from a curly black wire in her mother’s library.

It’s late-may leaflets, accommodating ladybugs, on the reaching white birch outside of her family’s farmhouse attic window.

It’s pistachio pudding salad for Easter at that same farm, in 13 crystal dishes–the 14th was her Papa Sam’s, and he ate tapioca.

Sometimes it’s the tealish green in her father’s marbled birthstone ring, passed down to him from his granny. “They shared a birthday, you know.”

Often, it’s the moss that grows both on the boulders at Davidson’s Park

in Westby, W.I., and on the sandy edges of Minnehaha Falls.

For a while, it was the shaved ‘90s carpet in her upstairs bedroom, in an old fading house, in an old fading town, where she often felt bored.

After that, it was the tattoo ink in the shape of a daisy on her mother’s back that was once black, but through time turned into the “most beautiful pine.”

Lately, it’s been my eyes. She thinks they’re the greenest green of all, even though my driver’s license says ‘Eye color: blue.’