Brooms

For Grotto

Gypsies jump the broom when they marry,
so did African American slaves.
In China, the land of one time zone,
I saw women sweep the streets in the morning
dark, for no pay, as fruit and parasols were set out to sell.
The monks of Tibet sweep sand into the center of the mandala.
Walking home from the Dollar Store with a new broom,
a low rider slowed to ask me why I didn’t fly home.
Good question. With this new broom,
I sweep my kitchen as the fourth step of my morning ritual,
then move out to the porch, water the flowers, pour seed
in the feeder for the wrens and finches, sweep away cobwebs.
Women have been known to dance with brooms when no partner is available.
They are not hard to follow. In fact, one can lead, for a change.
Brooms are graceful, useful, benign.
Grotto ran from brooms.
So Mom laid brooms on the floor
and finally, he stepped over one.
In his home, her home, brooms would never be wielded, only swept.
The last time I swept around Grotto, he did not cringe
or even budge.
The last time I saw Grotto, at Christmas, he lay with the cats
in front of the fire, at peace.

For Chris

After Tosca stabbed Scarpia, lay the crucifix on his corpse,
your head drooped to your chest.
All dressed up, someplace to go, you slept.
On our way to a peace march in DC,
which one ?
The country perpetually at war
throughout our marriage and beyond –
you fell asleep at the wheel and we swerved
across the center line
on a two-lane stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Reading my first completed short story, you nodded off, snored.
Now I believe you, it was no rebuke.
Alive, you were weary, bone weary.
Now you are ash, you may rest.

Walkoff

Even in Espana, siesta, nada.
Muerte. My students say
baseball is too slow,

prefer
staccato,
first person shooter.

My pace, pelota’s pace,
largo,
slower than adagio,

and with more dignity,
per my dictionary,
and old school, big ass print dictionary,

with sticky note
over the tarantula illustration
in the Ts.

A game unbearably
suspenseful
and a catnap op,

room for both
in nine innings
or more.

Clocks, sundials, spheres,
round, slow
as the progress of baseball.

Transistor, hammock, tree,
ash, maple, Louisville Slugger
meets a slider.

As earth orbits the sun,
moon the earth,
Miguel Cabrera rounds the bases.

Tresspass

TRESPASS

My high school boyfriend, one blue eye, one brown,

jumped a fence and pricked his thumb, plucking  a blossom cultivated

by a woman’s hands fated to twist like ginger root,

and I had seen her hands pruning, weeding, mulching.

Now I smiled as he stole, a total betrayal of my neighbor,

who let me pet her collies. Having trespassed to please me, he tucked

the rose behind my ear and the little pink shell bled. What luck.

Also in his favor, he swerved to spare possums and cats,

unlike the boys who ran footballs and the student body,

ran everything it seemed, though not him and not me.

We scorned their Hitler Youth Rallies, stoking bloodlust for Friday’s games,

ditched them to French kiss on the wrong side of the tracks,

which transgression put our names on a list for detention,

okay with us, we courted martyrdom, suspension.

Jesus-haired, all sophomore year cooling his coolness

for B and E in juvie.  Now he was free. He was mine. He was groovy.

Work Ethic

The longer I live, the more feline I become.
My lazy grail quest has led to a plot of sunlight
exactly the size of a small mammal.
All morning, I envy birds through the window.
All afternoon, I idly wish to be fed and stroked.
Failing in these desires,
with a subtle paw, I knock something off its pedestal,
then a succession of small things.
Around five I eat.
A friend says she wants to come back as a cat.
I already have.

Jessica Eliza

A slant of light falls through Belgian lace curtains, fingers
the dresser drawer where you hide chocolate bars.

After dinner, we walk the rows of your flower garden.
You teach me their names: iris, marigold, peony,

sweet william, portulaca, rose. You show me
pansies have faces, tell me stories

of you as a bride, opening the cellar door
of your first house

to find three snakes coiled on the top steps.
Under your eyes, I see shadows the color of orchids.

A bald porcelain doll with a chipped nose
stares at me from the dresser in my mother’s old bedroom.

I won’t sleep until I put her in a drawer.

When you sleep, a net cast over your white hair
sparkles with rhinestones.

When you shop, more rhinestones glitter in a veil
over your eyes and a strawberry brooch flashes on your bosom.

In Oleson’s Grocery Store, you clutch my arm
with a white-gloved hand. We slowly choose sweets.

You never leave the house unhatted, unveiled,
ungloved, unpinned, alone. You never learn to drive.

Your son was sent to clean up Nagaski,
your daughters idolize their father, not you.

A day on the road with him in his big red truck
means sitting in the cab, listening to him prod

cattle into the slaughterhouse.
I prefer your garden, your veil.

Johhny Depp

Oh my lotus eater,
my lynx,
my opium den pin-up,
so slowly rolling your clove cigarettes,

would you ask me
to pedal a mountain bike uphill, helmeted,

or would you prefer me shell-pink indoors,
tussled and abed?

Your kohl-rimmed eyes answer, the latter.

No Loki under our four-poster,
no apple of discord on the terrazzo,

we’d sink into sleep like stones
in a pool.

Our days a smudge-lilac haze
of incense and Russian blue cats,

no one save a tattoo artist
or sommelier bearing shiraz

would step foot in our humid courtyard,
green with maidenhair fern.

We’d dream like this for years,
and die in our sleep.

Quelle heure est-il?

Between our two households, not one clock keeps time
and my nearsightedness blurs every scrap of moon full.
How, then, are we to know what phase we are in,
hunt or harvest?

Ginger or Mary Ann?

Based on an unscientific survey, I’d say
most men rank Ginger below Mary Ann. Way
below. Quibble with my methodology. You may.
But admit I’m right, admit you
prefer fresh-faced, virginal Mary Ann;
in fact, you will offer her your hand.
Scary Ginger — she’s no size 2 —
reels you in with her tightly
cinched waist and big behind. You’re tripping
because she’s got the upper hand, talons gripping
tightly, but then you grab her flaming bouffant
by the mousy brown roots, you want what you want,
all that Bozo orange rinsed out, because dye lies
as does the lacquered beehive
and now she’s fighting for her life,
Ginger, she’ll scrub that war paint off her face
or you’ll scrub it off for her in a scalding tub,
filling as we speak.
How else to tweak?
Replace fuck-me sandals with sneakers.
Now tower over Ginger, Dominate her.
Braid in pigtails —
aw, look she’s biting her nails
like a nervous girl of twelve,
cute, clean enough to marry.
But that gets old,
you’re a guy, you’ll shelve
Mary Ann, cruise for some spice,
some vice. Some ginger.

Ocean

A young widow,
burdened by two bodies,
one warm, one cold,
spins an austere cello solo,
the only vinyl she still owns.
His answer, submerged
as the song of a whale,
inaudible to the human ear,
her ear, pink as a shell
whose rushing disconnects
the call and response
of cold body full fathom five
to warm woman
entombed in her bed.