For an unseasonably warm day
February and the daffodils are nosing
through my midwestern lawn,
February rain bringing March flowers.
Leaving school the path is daylit and people
warble good byes, arms waving from open cars.
Bicycles are dusted; children lose their hats.
It’s all wrong.
My New England heart wants
to return to her own dark kitchen
where yellow light puddles
like warm tallow on the oil cloth;
wants to boil beans, soaked and swollen
to tenderness, until they slip
from their jackets,
smoke and shimmy.
The laughter of working men
drifts into my back window.
At once I am 18, the girl from the office
taking a smoke break in a smear of fluorescent light
outside the hissing factory.
I want to be an artist in black
who has everything she needs,
but with sweat trickling down the small of my back
in this too-short polyester dress
it is easier to joke,
easier to pick the one with the wallet wife
and the key to his buddy’s place,
easier to give him the one thing
without seeming to want to,
easier to pretend I care a little
until I walk out to the cab at dawn
and don’t look back.
The mind is not always our friend
The wanting to die dies hard.
Not that I really want to.
I can be happy –
taking the dog with me to the Post Office,
smelling the first wood fire of the season –
but when I cut back on the viaduct I freeze.
Well, I make it across,
but I have to talk to the dog
the whole way to keep
from stepping over the rail.
Or I’m driving to work,
singing Birds do it, bees do it
and a semi passes.
I have to clamp my hands tight
to keep from steering into that space under the trailer.
I’m pretty sure my car would fit.
People think I’m skittish,
afraid of heights and speeds and such,
but I’m telling you
that’s not exactly it.
Four men at the laundromat together,
uniform in white shirts and ties,
hair trimmed like lawns.
Moonies, maybe, or Mormons,
not hard enough for the service.
Their glasses reflect the sun.
Yes, i decide, Christians,
looking for a sanitary theology.
I am a happy beast before them.
With my blood-clotted cottons,
my flea bites, and sweat,
I claim this flesh
from which they fell,
and into which
at sunset
they slide like fish.
I. Ready
The former beauty turns a few graying heads
as she enters the bar.
Her skirt is tight and she’s still not wearing underwear
because her mother told
“always be ready for him.” And she is,
though her husband hasn’t touched her in months.
She waits,
folding her hair over and over
with her hand.
II. A Coup
The former beauty is tan again this summer,
blonder, and able to get into her thin jeans, too
At the veterinarian’s office
she sits with her golden retriever,
absently stroking his head and ears.
The young vet emerges to scan the waiting room.
His gaze pauses in her direction,
a dancer suspended at the apex of his leap, and moves on.
III. On the Street
A beautiful young man sits on the curb
outside the grocery.
The former beauty thinks for a moment
he might be a boy she dated a few times in college.
Oh, but that was more than twenty years ago;
this could be his son.
Unnoticed, she watches him from her car.
He is waiting for the girl
with the blue tattoo
carelessly pricked onto the flawless skin
of her left shoulder.
IV. Shopping
The former beauty keeps her eyes down as she pushes the cart
so no one knows she is moving her legs around a longing
she no longer believes she deserves.
No one knows she’s watching
snapshots of his wrist, his shirt sleeve rolled back,
exposing a scrape from something in his life,
about which she knows nothing,
and the other thing, so palpable, impossible.
She lowers herself onto him,
but even in her mind her body is ridiculous.
In produce a boy stacks bananas quickly.
The bruises will develop once she gets them home,
once they ripen. This boy. If she asked him
would he run? Stare and breathe through his mouth
in disbelief? Fear? Would he smile?
She has no idea what is possible any more.
She picks up avocado, palming the wrinkled skin,
and eggplant, rubbing its smooth purple.
She holds an unwashed grape in her mouth.
Maybe she could ask someone. Casually.
Ask someone about whom she cares nothing,
what is possible? And read the answer
in his careful pauses.
V. At the Reception
The former beauty is seated at the extra women’s table.
Silently
she slides her thumb under the heavy necklace of rose quartz,
lifts the beads to her lips,
and marvels at the warmth left from her breasts.
VI. At the Mirror
The former beauty pulls at the sides of her face
and realizes she’ll never wear flowers in her hair again.
No longer possible, the fair Ophelia,
mad with love and beautiful in madness.
Now she is Ophelia dredged,
puffy and pale,
no longer in love. Or mad.
VII. In the Yard
In her fat nephew’s cast-off shorts and tee shirt
the former beauty weeds the front flower bed.
The cool breeze brushes the sun’s heat
from the back of her neck.
The sedum is the last thing in bloom.
She cuts her hand on a dry daylily leaf,
sucks the blood.
A car of teenage boys drives by.
They honk, yell something.
She waves with her injured hand,
assumes she must know them from somewhere,
and returns to the day’s work.
Call I’ve got the telephone cradled against my shoulder and through the receiver, soft and pushy like the cat’s cheek or Nat King Cole’s voice you keep saying It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right. I’m hanging onto a telephone, a bleak voice speaking to me from a black space … Continue reading “Call”
Call
I’ve got the telephone
cradled against my shoulder
and through the receiver,
soft and pushy like the cat’s cheek
or Nat King Cole’s voice
you keep saying
It’s going to be all right.
It’s going to be all right.
I’m hanging onto a telephone,
a bleak voice speaking to me from
a black space where the inevitable
might not happen tonight.
She makes coffee,
drains the pot.
Feels sick. A sign. A sign?
She recalls the lip-biting grin,
the double nod,
imagines them quickened
to a piscean reality.
She turns her mind, willfully,
and still it returns, returns
to that dark pool.
She sleeps and hears waves.
She works and hears little whale calls.
She is a gate.
She is a cove.
She is dumb as a sea cave,
waiting to be startled
by the life within
or the blood emerging.
Little things I think about sometimes
Amber
It’s my story, too.
Old sap
surrounding something vague,
possibly precious.
Her Tattoo
A hand’s span beneath her belly button
it read:
EAT ME
with an arrow for clarity.
By her ninth month
it was billboard big and blurred.
Folding back the clinic sheet
the intern saw it
above the baby’s crown.
Schism
How glad the fissiparous paramecium!
When she cracks she fashions full families
out of her fractures.
When she tears herself apart
she produces a happy proliferation
of her own point of view.
How sad for us
having risen above her,
to have pulled ourselves together
to stand so alone.
Irish is Dying
Irish is dying,
so Pat and I, roots deep in the peat,
are off to community college to save it.
We learn
there are consonants, slender and broad.
Slender as in si, pronounced she.
Broad, as in gaoth, pronounced gway.
Nouns are declining around us
and nothing is as it seems.
Teach looks easy, until it turns into tschalk.
Shibh, impossible to puzzle out,
turns out to be shiv, something I’m ready to use.
We learn
to say “Is anyone at all satisfied?”
and “He is happy, but she is not happy.”
both of which we commit to memory,
knowing they’ll be useful in Dublin or Belfast.
We learn
there are very few speakers of Irish left in Ireland
and none at all at community college.
Francine M. Provost O’Connor, 4/08/30-10/10/07
Mouse’s End
Mother, farm bred and practiced,
fills the bucket to the very top
while staring in the direction of
the greasy green ceramic tile –
too good to replace yet.
The cage is sent for.
My sister returns, sobbing and stumbling,
stepping on the chalky white polish of her own shoes.
My father, the still center of the storm,
sits in gaping cotton boxer shorts
with his head forward saying,
“It’s the most humane thing.
Get your father a beer.”
My sister sets the cage down,
delivers the beer, wills herself invisible.
We’re ready.
Whitey drops head first
into the cold tap water.
Mother clamps the scratched plate on.
A roiling,
then the gift of silence.
Good Friday
From 12 to 3 you have to sit on the couch
and not do anything.
Our Lord was suffering from 12 to 3
and usually now it rains because the world is sad
about the suffering of Our Lord.
You can’t even jiggle your foot
because God the Father will see
and be very sad that you are jiggling
on the day his Son died.
You can’t color or even read,
you have to just sit and think about Jesus
and the nails in his hands and feet
and how the soldiers took his clothes off
and how someone poked him with a sword
to see if he was really really dead
and how the blood came out.
It’s okay if the dog plays
but you can’t throw the ball for her,
because you are the one made in God’s image.
And no matter how much you want to go outside,
you can’t.
You have to sit and think about how
you have it good in this country
with lots of food and cars and
the freedom to worship Jesus however you want.
Something to Thank my Mother for
I was born first.
I was the largest, hanging low and heavy like wet sheets on the line.
Her mother was two months dead and her husband in the service,
so she rode to the hospital in her father’s truck.
Massachusetts in January was dark as the grave.
Her fingers had swollen, so she couldn’t wear her wedding ring.
My eyes were brown at once, oxidized by the sterile air.
So the nurses judged her abandoned, me a half-breed,
and brought her coffee and smokes.
As for me –
I was so round, so satisfied, so wombful,
I slept and slept.
I never woke for food.
I was already left-handed and dreamy.
My whole first year she had to tickle the bottoms of my feet
to wake me, crying:
Look at this. Look.
Tuning up
Thanking My Parts
Now I lay me down to sleep,
my equilibrium to keep.
I thank the parts that make me me
even when they disagree.
The part that prays,
the part that smokes,
the part that tells the dirty jokes,
the part that eats,
the part that reads,
the part that knows my carnal needs.
All the parts that make me tick
flash by me like a grade-B flick.
And if I die before I wake
I hope I get another take.
The Therapy Rag
First you do some primal screams
kill your mommy in your dreams
Find out who you really hate and
Separate separate separate.
Own your anger, watch the hooks
thrown out by emotion’s crooks.
Do you resent your daughter?
Well you know you oughter.
Doing the therapy rag.
I’m okay and so are you
To your own adult be true
Get rid of guilt, there is no sin, you’re
born to win, born to win, born to win.
Went to the bank took out a loan
and now my integrated self’s my own.
And when she sees me
Oh how she frees me
Doing the therapy
Demand you be fair to me
No one takes care of me
Doing the therapy rag.
Dan
Dan’s a man who looks like a boy
in a Gilligan hat
with penguins marching around the band.
With his eyes closed
he recites poetry he learned by heart
when he was a real boy.
He’s a psychiatrist now,
pear-shaped from sitting on
other people’s problems,
trying to hatch them
into something that can fly.
Small Poems de Terre 