Beyond the Frame by Ann Leamon

The woman lies alone in the field—
you’ve seen the painting—peering
over the horizon. The gray, weathered
house looms behind her, overwhelms her fragile
life. Did she really drag herself
out to the field? Why? Maybe for the same reason
my mother dragged the four of us back then:
to pick blueberries.

We packed a lunch, spent the day. Mom
picked berries, we climbed the rocks
along the cove, water cold
and green and clear as our futures seemed to be.

As the sun slipped low, Mom’s buckets full
of berries for jam and winter muffins,
we went to the steep hill
you can’t see in the painting,
above the little graveyard, and threw ourselves
down to roll,
roll,
roll,
arms and legs flying, shrieking
with delighted terror and surprise, to end
at the bottom dizzy, covered with twigs and leaves.

Stumbling, sunburned, sleepy—
Mom piled us in the station wagon for
the long drive home. The berries are still there,
I hear, and Christina hangs in the museum,
looking out of her frame to that hill,
to the graveyard at the bottom,
where she will be buried.



Ann Leamon writes poems, reviews, essays, and technical finance material. Her non-technical work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Arts Fuse, Tupelo Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and River Teeth Journal, among others. She lives on the Maine coast with her husband and an opinionated Corgi-Lab mix.