December 26th, on the sidewalk
in front of The Home
a plaid cloth suitcase, zippers torn, gaping
clothes spilling into mud and dust, two pair
of jeans, one black, one blue, a matched pair
of gray sweats, a man’s green work shirt, pair
of brown shoes, toothpaste tube pushed back
into its open cardboard wrapping, new tooth
brush still in cellophane, empty medicine vials,
crushed can of soda, and a new child’s paint set,
two dozen rows of unsoiled color dulling
against a gray sky
Grandfather or Father
I can’t tell which, he has always been the man
in charge, the girl dull and empty, heavy, dirty,
the baby running happy wild or dropped to the floor,
he asks the questions, gives the answers, puts
the prescriptions in his pockets, and this time
when he says the girl/mother’s gone missing
after school with the child and he’s found them
after six days in a house full of men and he wants
them checked, the baby’s coughing, he doesn’t
want the mother, he calls her his daughter,
pregnant again, and I’m having trouble
saying it, daughter/mother/father/daughter/
grandfather/granddaughter and I am peeling
the clothes off the baby crusted with shit
and she is laughing back at me the mother
sucks her thumb and I have to leave the room
have to wash and wash and wash the man
is gone he’s gone for diapers and the mother/girl
does not smile
Postcard on the first day of autumn
(after Wynn Cooper, 'Postcard in Search of the Truth’)
There was a maggot in the center of your book,
just where the string of the hand-sewn binding
was knotted, beside a photograph of a fallen bird’s
nest untangling on rough bark. She moved
slowly. Lifted her small brown head and the body
undulated, an acknowledgment of me
or of light, an imagined eye, or of air moving
over skin. I felt none of the loathing one
might expect, perhaps because it was one,
alone, and slow. I read the poem
on the facing page. I could not page further
without a smear, a crush, a loss. I thought
of Asanga, with a tissue swept her softly to the pail.
Imagine that other reader, book open on his lap in
summer sun, juice from an apple dropping
a sweet spot, a crumb from a muffin not brushed
away, the gravid fly alighting, his annoyance, his
slamming shut the book, then the slow hatch, dry wait,
unfolding, this startled welcome |
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