Without Urging

Without Urging
- after Jack Gilbert’s Music is the Memory of What Never Happened

Your best move this weekend was slipping your red
T-shirt over your head on the balcony
without my urging letting your whiteness
glimmer and drink in the bright autumn sun.
I was reading out loud from the poems you brought
and you rested your head on my pajama lap
eating rye toast and sliced apples with coffee.
I let the page edge cut into your breast
as my finger tapped out his rhythm over
and over again.  I grew bored, left you to study
and went in to salt the broth simmering.
From the kitchen sink window I checked
the perspective of young boys across the way.
Your knees propping up the economics text
blocked their view.  We had nothing to fear.
A little young yes for them to remember
the music they were missing, yet old enough
to begin to make out the first notes and like Jack
look for an instrument near by to play.

Biting Orange

Biting Orange

I pushed a thumb into the rind.
Its bitter tear stung my eye.
I didn’t like the work an orange required.
The seeds, the sticky pulp, the pale flesh
under my nails like chalk.
Smelling limonene all day?

A dark veined sliver of ivory soap
slipped down the kitchen drain.
My skin’s oil failed an essential’s onslaught.
Strong reagents in mother’s classroom
or stranger brews beneath the sink
unveiled a cleaner smell,

shaving the weeks a human takes to shed its skin.
I want simpler fruit than she provided.

Periodic Evaluation

Periodic Evaluation

In a witness room crowded by
a TV trolley,

stained by other protected lips
a paper cup

sits desiccated
by fluorescent lights

on the faux-walnut table top.
No space for both of us.

White hair buzzing, her face flares
grey over me, demanding

that I have no place here.
So help you god. The maroon

smeared across the linoleum floor
must be coffee.