Homecoming – Ruby Cook

August 27, 2025

The Runt Lamb

 
He can still hear the mewls of his littermates, still feel their nudging
muzzles, that languid hunger. How frail he was from the rest
when they pushed him to the orchard skirts, among arnica and sorrel.
His body was a waning crescent, his muscles brought him to the ground,
and when the woman saw him left beneath one young, expectant apple tree,
she picked him up, embraced him with a pastel tenderness,
cradled him along the pavement, mustered up a woolen sweater,
nursed him until he was lush – a stuffed lamb found on a toy store shelf.
And now the farm boys won’t discard him like all those corn husks,
and even when his keeper watches him frantic and circling, knocking
into the garden gate, finds a milky, clouded film across each eye,
she will hold him fondly, brushing through his rumpled coat.

 

Renoir’s Woman Crocheting, c. 1875

 
She is stitching a seafoam swell,
waves reaching her bare
fingertips and the eager needle.

Polished bulbine locks pour,
wind about her candy ears,
frame the silver stringed anchors
dangling from each lobe.

Her body is surged with aqua,
marine layer rising up one arm,
a supple stingray underbelly.

Without a shining pupil,
the faith in her is patent,
figure all gold and green,
lambent in the midnight studio.

Heart-shaped face, black lids,
I look to her and see a girl I knew,
the sea and sickness parting us.

Her delicate hands are Sofie’s,
who’d crochet me a whole white-cap,
wait for my mainsail to emerge,
waving to her through saline wind.

 

Independence Day

 
My rain boots were chalked with the pond
water of yesterday, the rubber piping
dusted in summer’s sun-dried clay.
Crouched like a cat in the prairie
dropseed, little blue
flowers crawling up my
calves, brushing away the dirty
remnants of murky footsteps,
stirring current.
In the pocket of my eyelet
dress I kept a roadside apple,
lifted from the trailing copse
pressed against hip bone,
skin and white trim, I pressed
my feet into the folded milkweed
its lymphs drained down
through the feathered bottlebrush.
Vanilla sweet grass climbed collarbone,
climbing through my damp hair,
reaching through the temperate air,
for the skipper on his shoulder,
watched its mottled wings thresh
above the warbler’s ground nest,
tipped my quiet toes away from her
feeble shelled embryos, pigment
stippled at the bottom swell.
Potential energy buzzed above
the swarm of baby’s breath,
making me look up, not to cedar
waxwing, but industry.
My stoop magnified water striders
hands holding reddened knees,
desiring tadpoles, how they huddled
as I cast my hand into the spring.
Swaying through the switchgrass,
my timeworn quilt peaked out,
settled under a flecked sunlight,
one stray leaf fallen on its cotton,
deep green veins severing
stitches threaded pink.
The crinkled fabric breathed
softly when I stepped across, finding
my bearings before
he fucked me like a genius.

 

The 5th Arrondissement 

 

I

Beyond this small  apartment–
beyond its posy of tulip stems
slouched over the glass 
rim of my french press,
their cantaloupe petals 
napkins unfurled–
a pinstriped waiter seesaws heel to toe, 
calfskin loafers stippled with candlelight.
He lauds his choice burgundy, 
its piney joys and oaken history,
dandyish in his dotted tie, 
carefully gelled curls worn 
from nicotine and kitchen steam. 
William nods cavalier, grasping
the card-stock menu while 
A little boy at the register
points up to one strawberry macaron
stickily gleaming in its polished case. 

Cheesecakes huddle in the bistro window
with their snow-topped powdery roofs
and dotted raspberry chimneys.
Peaches and persimmons festoon
Rue Saint-Denis. When bisected 
their juices flush, seeping
into my wooden board. 

 

II

Through Luxembourg 
the parakeets croak,
their electric lime coats 
curtained by beech leaves.
A woman in arctic
fox and flat shoes
applies balm to her winter lips.
All of us are writing screenplays
or taking pictures of the city at night
or reading Collette or talking about
wanting to. The bar table listens
as one girl orders a mojito charmed
with a couple of day-old mint leaves.
She mourns another 
open relationship from California
until a rising moon falls 
over this green glass canal
and we stop twice past the bridge,
peering at thrushes flickering by,
watching the water swell and shrink.

 

III

A little dog crouches in the ticket corridor, 
whimpering as my long wool flips past
air vents and the tense faces of women
who wrap their scarves just below the nose.
One freezes when a man at the train hall
babbles in her ear, hoping stillness 
will bore him, if not her glaring lack
of sparkled eyes or supple skin, black
around the waterline. She wants anyone
to give more than half-anything. 
Her lavender yarn-dipped palm holds
the rail, and she is a tired woman. 

 

IV

William’s black jeans walk beside my skirt,
my hand hooking the elbow of his
pocketed arm, little to say aloud
as we parade past clementines, 
kiwis and pears displayed like mice
in a pet shop window where 
my mother would appease my longing 
to box one up, drive it home, 
and I’d kneel before it’s tank, 
tapping expectantly at the glass.

 

V

I am more beautiful here
in the American mountains.
The plum blossoms thawing, 
lemony anthers reaching,
the lawn unkept and wringing-wet,
the swell of spring beauties, bloodroot,
the blanket flower’s tiny ivory trumpet. 
The sun’s burn dyeing grape hyacinths 
from green to a luscious bunch of blue.
The distance builds and I see in the glass,
that I prefer myself alone, bathing in the stars 
of an unobstructed twilight,
without neon tabac signs, streetlights.
There is a quiet warmth in the raw dark, 
one window lit across the lawn, 
its flushed glow gripping like a mother
in my homecoming.