Elizabeth Bradfield
Swaddled, No Matter
—for Gracie
Easier to think of the quilt
buried with her, wrapped
around her deep-ish in the yard’s
sand. Fake quilt. Pieces machine
printed on a cotton-poly bolt,
inner stuffing pulled from some chain
of chemicals. It warmed us from our start
on your attic bedroom futon. That was before
her.
The bed’s bottom sheet
was a dark pine and now the same
green rings the cleared space
around our house where pear tree
and ever-failing rhubarb, where
hammock and her grave.
It was as kind
as we could make it. I held her
body, carried those last weeks up
stairs and into cars so she could smell
dune and sea. The vet fed her treat
after treat and she ate them too
fast to taste, as always. Her bowels
relaxed, she was fecund on my lap
the ride back home. Better scent
than whatever sat, unmoving, in her blood.
We dug the hole. We drank manhattans,
leaning on the shovel. The quilt, which
I’d decided
was too worn for us,
had become hers years ago. It had
thin sateen piping along its edge, rose
gold. Years before we met, you’d
used it in your first apartment. I’ve seen
the photos of it & the lovers of that time. And I’m
not sure whether it comforts me that under
the sweetfern we planted and the slate stone
set on top so coyotes couldn’t dig,
the quilt may still, six years on,
be whole,
undegradable. It holds her bones. Her
gnawed and sleep-curled form. Her.
Gone within its unnatural persistence.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Toward Antarctica. Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro, is forthcoming this fall. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she works as a naturalist/guide and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.