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.

Amy Lemmon, poetry editor for ducts.org, accepted two (or 3) of my poems for the ducts summer 2010 edition.

http://www.ducts.org/content/two-poems-9/

His Big House

His Big House

Jack’s friends lit candles.

Libby read Kindness.

I shook all the hands—

sustained embraces.

When the last guest was gone

she re-arranged the back room

imposing her order

over yours or her mother’s.

The furnace works long

to melt winter’s breath

drawn through a window

some summer cracked open.

As long as I have

this big house,

you have a place to stay

if you need one.

“Then I would hope you will keep that big house

so I have a place to stay when I need one.”

A silver frame cradles

a photo of Jack

climbing his tall sister

in Chenonceau’s garden.

The cold glass blurs

but I can’t polish it clean.

The tarnished loop and whorl

trace ridges like my own.

Dust collects under Jack’s bed.

I swapped his for yours

so others feel his support

and imprint his firm mattress.

I stopped resetting the clock

when the power comes on.

A green beacon beats

from your dark bedroom.

You can heal faster here,

not on your own,

and sound depths of your heart

worn brittle, riddled by grief.

My guests, you and I,

we understand much

too late.  Please don’t you

think that it’s time?

“What may I bring to make me feel welcome?

Cook us his favorite

after school snack.

“I will pan fry Jiaozi or hard boil an egg.”

Make sticky rice as well—

I share his sweet tooth.

I hold a Bordeaux

I hold a Bordeaux

The glass tapered so the wine ignores the tongue
worms down the throat into the brain’s meaty pit.
In the browning edge she says something I miss.
The glass crumbles like an eggshell. A few drops bleed
into the table’s grain. Disappear. I hold
the glass, a broken bird that slapped a window,
still aloft so she could see. Or like a peony
slumped on the asphalt defeated by the morning dew.
Did grief constrict my grip? Is wine preserved
like the yoke in a broken belly? But my palm
is washed. Red drains down my wrist, sticks my jeans
against a leg. Make the anger run more rampant.
More glasses would survive and I could feel the shard.

Ode to a Pillow

Ode to a Pillow

You slept nights in 300 count cotton.
Maybe towards the end,
Denise shrouded you in 500.

Only today I noticed you missing.
In some police locker, obviously,
with the knife and GameCube.

I have to admit some jealousy.
You were the last to bruise his cheeks,
to taste vomit on his lips.

When you smothered his cries,
did you feel his tears soak through your slip
and stain you where you blinded him?

There was an instant, wasn’t there--
when he fought through the drugged sleep,
to feel his arms pinned between her legs?

You didn’t answer him, did you.
You thought you’d shelter him
from the precise nature of her betrayal.

I know you lay awake always
searching for his head to cushion—
to atone for his eternal rest.

If I can’t praise you, dear pillow,
if I don’t petition your release,
where will I find my place to sleep?