She Counts What Splits the Days
Where was the sale I’m going?
Heavy
sometime I am so grand,
my
grandmother nosed in deep,
“Honor
your jacket,
glimpse
the catalog kicking.”
in
a reverence giddy—
No,
I didn’t hang Christ
about
my neck, but Christopher
the
Saint, given me young,
was
on my chest long before hair,
and
then traded for it like
colored
furniture in time.
My
grandmother’s prayer-fingered
holiday
talk is secondly
sat
from Nordstroms.
She
drives me where,
with
a well-thumbed card
and
must contact, I know,
what
beckons to each
of
her precisions.
“Your
father wore shirts like these.
And
look, they’re marked down—
I
think he must be watching, don’t you?”
Morning Paper
You
open the newspaper with its
rubber
band on your wrist and
ten
beak fingers, draw your
finger’s
nail line by line, scanning
print,
scraping a layer off my
nerves
while you cough and read.
The
prices, you yawn, and the
terrorists,
you say, and the
housing,
the water, the dog attack
and
the tax of property always
upwards
and shifting.
Mumbling,
text-eyed, irretrievable,
you
turn a page for three minutes.
I
crash against you and
your
paper is sorry and,
old
husband,
I
am old wife because of you.
Three Lives
Two
people and I
over
birdmeat baked in a glass dish,
a
stirring over this hum,
devouring
of animals, its dullness,
and
our starring over carnivore theory.
A
feeling I’ve not had
in
one thousand years
scores
its planks against my ear,
knocks,
and walks in.
We
fress this ruffed animal to its bones
and
sit back.
Fitful Night in the Mexican Hotel
On the bed of their first night in marriage
there
were two geckos and a thirteen-ounce stone
of
pure, dark chocolate.
The
geckos were Tokay, were blue with red fades
on
their reptilian backs.
They
were warders,
advised
the concierge,
of
the sinister, local ghosts who haunted marriages.
The
chocolate was a blessing,
according
to
the concierge.
While
the geckos made quiet, ominous
treks
about the ceiling and walls,
the
recently married couple went along
in
their traditional consummation,
feigning
ignorance of the concierge
who
watched from a chair
across
the room.
At
midpoint, the concierge cleared
his
nose into a napkin
and
then opened it,
examining
the Rorschach print
his
emulsion had made.
Whatever
story he gained
in
this was satisfactory,
as
he nodded
in
agreeance.
“I
love you,” said the husband to the wife
and
the wife was warm with this
and
repeated back.
“Commodity! Good!” shouted the concierge
as
one of the Tokays fell into his lap.
“Now,
tell her with your part,
that
one way or another,
you
will always be with her.”
The
husband withdrew, held
it
and said:
One way or another. Always.
The
concierge lit a small firecracker,
tossed
it to the floor
where
it snapped out its exclamation
with
a black-powder report.
One
of the geckos devoured the other
and
burst its own stomach.
The
concierge began eating the chocolate,
saying
that this was an equivalent form
of
blessing the blessing.
The
wife made a sound of euphor.
The
husband reinstituted himself
with
a certain focus while the hotel
burned
to the ground
all
night through
by
a dead sea
full
of drowned captains.
