Aubade
Into the arms of a house we
have stored
our longing though not in
the bric-a-brac
of antique loves, not in an
everlasting
of heirloom china, Dutch
figurines,
plastic fruit and wine-dark
mahoganies.
Shy and sweet seducers, we
still look
to be shriven from our
cares, not yet
sunken by a hundred
accessorized
wares and the duty-tax of
custom.
Here, I suffer only the
weight of one thin
hand coaxing thoughts down
the hill
of a cheekbone to phantom
acres
cloaked in green, to the
wrens’ nest
tucked into the wooden
eaves,
to a shared bed of
bird-song.
Household Gods
Photos of the old loves
surface
from the moving boxes
and here we use past
tenses, handling the idols
of hurt tendernesses from a
time
that lived and dressed,
wished
and worried itself
differently.
Left to grow a moss cover
of dust, to patina there
among the unused silver
or rest beside the rusting
cynic of the old bike pump--
left to age among such
strange
household gods as a decade’s
Christmas cards or
a childhood’s sweaters.
Let our old loves benignly
muster with the other
retired simulacra,
broken down the seams.
Saturday’s Love Letter
To the one-armed reach that
makes the bed
or asks me to it; to the
forgetfulness that walks
about the house in dirty
socks and a bike helmet;
to the daily egg halved
across all-wheat toast
like a shy, white rump
tanning on its own beach
blanket; to what sleeps, all
six-six tucked up—
hands, elbows, knees—like a
pious communicant
or a matron of noblesse
oblige; to the dreams that
speak like Menelaus haunted
by the eyes of Helen
or the altar boy versed in
benedictions that he can
no longer believe in. The
child who fast outgrew
all simple creeds stirs,
now, in unmanned sleep:
forced upon his own sins and
saints, made-up prayers
and morning rites as when he
sits in the gray light
of an autumn kitchen,
waiting for a slow-boned
woman to rise and wake, to
kiss into the stern
unstraightening lines of his
own, self-born forehead.
The Harp-Beat
This is infant knowledge:
how the newborn held
against his mother’s chest,
comforts to the slower
rhythm of the larger,
grown-up heart, calmed in its
broad doorway, led down a
warm red aisle
to where it plays: a tall
cathedral harp
to an infant-pagan heart,
cantering
the day’s gallop into the
nether
of all impertinences.
Against your heart or
harp-beat, to a rhythm
that beds each titian fear
and hurdy-gurdy
of lunch-hour neuroses: to
be so held,
so solaced I would wish upon
all
the greedy stars, lonely in
their
astral glamour, that each
night
slow to the steadying bliss
of bearing through, to this.
A Little Dog
(Susan)
As strange a coincidence as
death itself: that Susan
bought a Labrador
puppy two days before her mother
died—in her sleep, beside
the steady faith of her
husband of sixty-one years,
now ‘survived by.’
All winter I saw Susan out
walking her little dog
and mammoth grief in the
cold grey of church-like
mornings, the dew hardened
on the stiff lawns
of the sleeping, those
untroubled by the dawn’s
charade of ghosts. From
behind a kitchen curtain,
I watched Susan, a coat thrown
over her lawyer’s suit
or in blue pajamas and
gardening shoes, her head bent
towards the rude life
chafing its leash against her hand,
wagging its indifference to
all and her shoulders’
tired slope. A mother loved
and already gone,
heired onto the ages’
mother-lode: all that
we carry at the locked key
of the navel.
The Ears of Flowers
(Henry)
From my second story, I
watch Henry’s hands
comb through cool soil and
leaves, tending
dahlias and lilacs, myrtle
and cyclamen.
Since his arthritis is
better in the morning
and since, as a dentist, he
always began
before seven on the teeth of
Franciscan
nuns and foremen, on
thick-armed vets
and the mayor’s skittish
wife. He bends,
whispering to the ears of
flowers
as once his daughter tucked
her dolls
to bed, dreaming a life for
each painted
face, telling their flat
ears of each crush
and school-day hatred. He
hums, thinking
of those who once moored
themselves
in his hydraulic chair and opened
wide
for him to see: from my
second story.