(after Sherry Chandler)

1.
To get to be her husband
was luck
I’d gone down her dead 
end road
looking to walk the buffalo
trace to Blue Licks Springs,
she showed me where to start
and came along on a whim,
a clear cool day
after Thanksgiving
but I swear lightning
was in the air

Brief doubts 
life issues 
her children, my children
my job, her business
melted like bees’ wax
into a candle 
that we burned at both ends

Soapmaking on the scale 
of 1,500 bars per batch
left me amazed
at her strength 
of mind and body

Olive oil, coconut oi[, & tallow
she rendered from beef fat
in a cast iron pot with a wood fire,
mixed together and poured 
into a 50 gallon honey tank

My early morning task:
stirring it all together 
with a canoe paddle
for three hours.

2.
It must have been love

3.
Soapmaker
Queen of essential oils
Professor of alchemy
      to turn lye, water & oil
      into a oval bar shaped
      to be held in your hand
Artist of the label design
       and the exact act
       of wrapping each one
       in good time
CEO of sales, shipping & craft shows

4.
Look at the property of each kind:
Lavender
Lemongrass
Citrus 
Rose Geranium
Rosemary
Unscented

5.
Sometimes I open the letters
she gets from customers 
who are pleased to have a soap 
to which they are not alergic.
They often become life long friends

6.
Tonight
after 33 years of soapmaking
I sit with her 
in this old fashioned house
just 50 yards from the soap shop
where the bars from Thursday’s batch
are laid out on racks 
to dry for three weeks
before being wrapped by a neighbor’s 
teenaged daughters 
for some extra spending money.

7. 
Some people call a bar of soap
a Cake of soap.
We”ve had our cake
and washed with it too

8.
Sometimes I imagine 
our life together as two doves
flying about
and coming back to the same place