Whatever the Sunday, the sorrows kept the women
	in the kitchen,
My cousins and their mothers, my grandmother, her sister,
	all of them
Foraging through the nerves for pain.  They sighed and rustled
	and one would
Name her sorrows to cue sympathy’s murmurs, the first
	offerings
Of possible cures: three eggs for chills and fever,
	the benefits 
Of mint and pepper, boneset, sage, and crocus tea.
	Nothing they 
Needed came over-the-counter or through prescriptions
	not bearing
A promise from God, who blessed the home remedies
	handed down
From the lost villages of Germany for the aunt
	with dizzy spells,
For the uncle with the steady pain of private swelling;
	for passed blood,
For discharge and the sweet streak from the shoulder.  
	In the pantry, 
Among pickled beets and stewed tomatoes--the dark,
	honeyed liquids;
The vinegar and molasses sipped from tablespoons
	for sorrows
So regular they spoke of them as laundry to be smoothed
	by the great iron
Of faith which set creases worthy of paradise.  And there,
	when only
A hum came clear, they might have been speaking from clouds 
	like the dead,
But what mattered when the room went dark was the voices 
	reaching into 
The lamp-lit living room of men who listened then, watching
	the doorway
And nodding at the nostrums offered by the tongues 
	of the unseen
As if the sorrows were soothed by the lost dialect 
	of the soul 
Which whispered to the enormous ache of the imminent.