For The Unnamed Woman in a Photograph
at the New Haven Colony Historical Society

Fixing dinner fit for a preacher, there’s no slow syrup
hours on Sunday for you. It’s not Pulaski County,
Kentucky, but Fair Haven, Connecticut. Exchange
squirrels, hog feet and brains for your fish and clams,
you’d be my Grandma Todd in an apron trimmed

with rickrack bent over a soapstone sink holding strainer
and knives. Spare time’s for fixing. Rocking while a stove
heats to red, your fingers have to be busy shucking raw
oysters in pans set on a square table or turning collars
until pots of water fog the windows. Like my grandpa

who took off for the cow barn before dawn, tomorrow
your husband will be out with first light. Squirming
like an eel out of water, mornings he smells for stench
from low tide before it turns. You’d like to pan fry a mess
of dough for his lunch pail, but all he wants is mackerel

as he storms at you to dock your nonsense, shake
a leg or overtime will be paid to his boat’s crew. Sleep
only widens the space between hours that are tweezed
of pleasure, of friends that will not be given back to you
on this earth. If you did not corset days with work,

what would you do? Nets to mend piled by the door keep
you inside. There’s no way for you to pull yourself from
the catch your husband takes from the Quinnipiac River,
any more than the lobsters struggling on the mud-caked
linoleum can save themselves from your boiling pan.

*Vivian Shipley is editor of Connecticut Review and the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor. In 2001, she won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, and the Daniel Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club. In 2000, she won the Marble Faun Award for Poetry from the William Faulkner Society and numerous other prizes.