accumulation of land maintain household bear labor of house child
cooking reserve line belonging to elaborate isolation
familias implements enemies captured in war bearing child rearing
production heirs number and rear household family contains
She said the cornflake cake made her day,
she said a man cannot be blamed for being
unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his
extremities and it’ s just the way his body
chemistry is. She said all sorts of things.
We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub
of maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we saw
the walled garden and the old-fashioned library
in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafe
where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves
Getting the child to bed is awful work,
Committing that rage to sleep that will not sleep.
The lie rots in my throat saying, “O. K.
There is balm in Gilead. Go to bed.
Honey of generation has betrayed us both.”
And truly it is no wild surmise of darkness
Nor Pisgah purview of Canaan drowned in blood
But only my child saying its say in bed.
Because Yosemite’ s high altitude lake’ s
tadpoles wash up in
glow-in-the-dark condoms
and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because
there’ s bird shit
in the clouds. Things catch, get caught.
Things are consumed.
Does no dishes, dribbles sauce
across the floor. Is more dragon
than spaniel, more flammable
than fluid. Is the loosening
in the knit of me, the mixed-fruit
marmalade in the kitchen of me.
Wakes my disco and inner hibiscus,
the Hector in the ever-mess of my Troy.
All wet mattress to my analysis,
he’ s stayed the loudest and longest
of any houseguest, is calling now
as I write this, tiny B who brings the joy.
One girl a full head taller
Than the other — into their Sunday dresses.
First, the slip, hardly a piece of fabric,
Softly stitched and printed with a bud.
I’ m not their mother, and tangle, then untangle
The whole cloth — on backwards, have to grab it
Round their necks. But they know how to pull
Arms in, a reflex of being dressed,
And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,
one of my parents turned to me and said:
“We hope you end up here,”
where the shade relieves the light, where we sit
in some beneficence — and I felt the shape of the finite
after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,
of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be
under the trees, because the voice I’ d heard
could not cradle me, could no longer keep me
in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye
again, make my way across the white
What never comes when called.
What hides when held.
Guest
most at home where least
expected. Vagrant
balm of Gilead.
What, soon as here,
becomes
the body’ s native ground and,
We who must act as handmaidens
To our own goddess, turn too fast,
Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse
Gliding below her lake or sea,
Are left, long-staring after her,
Narcissists by necessity;
1
The perfect mother lets the cat
sleep on her head. The
children laugh.
Where is she?
She is not carefully ironing the starched
ruffles of a Sunday dress.
What does she say?
She does not speak.
Her head is under the cat and
like the cat, she sleeps.
2
