Better Company (and other newer poems)

Better Company

Slicing into a tomato at the counter there is a question:

What language is strong enough? I remember my father,

and vegetables, and vegetable gardens—turning on

the sprinkler—turning it off—the soft fuzz of grass cut

days before swathing and sticking around my ankle bone.

Father, I think of you, yes. I wonder how much of your hair

has grayed, and if you remember how long it has been

and if you really were afraid of me when I raised my voice.

I still want to stick it to you, like the green painted spade,

a trellis the morning glories are climbing up. I want to take you

down, as far as I have been, your hand twisting my wrist

until I couldn’t feel my hand, had I been paying attention

to it, not combing the clear brown sea of your eyes for weeds

for things I was hoping I would find, floating, like kindness,

tenderness, some sign that you are human, that you have always

been made of something, but I never found any of that,

did I? I ask God if your eyes will ever make windows, and would

it be a good idea if I brought you over a dinner plate so,

for once, the beer in your belly, and the yellow sludge

from of other waste, will have better company?

Here's the piece that was in the recent issue of Fishladder:

Web

Sorry about the rabbit turds

that will inevitably smoosh themselves

into the tread of your shoe.

Because of the rain, the snow melted,

and because the snow melted,

the turds are there, and the air smells

the way that old cow barn across the street

did before they burned it to the ground.

The air smells like straw and mud,

like rabbit turds, but sometimes the air smells

like your hairspray, and when you turn

to look into the hands of that maple for the Blue Jay

you swore you saw fly up there, I am flooded

with the smell of your hairspray.

The smell of your hairspray pushes my breath

back into my throat, and it combs my throat

the way cigarette smoke combs my throat,

and I feel almost as if I am eating your hair,

but I can see your hair in front of me.

When your hair gets caught in the tree branches

while we are walking the sun hits it

and it looks like spider webs in the morning.

Your hair feels like spider webs, in the morning,

on my face. It feels like sticky spider webs when you

haven’t washed it the night before, and your hairspray

is still tangled in it, the way dew gets tangled in webs.

Your hair feels like spider webs, sticky with hair spray,

sprawling my left cheek, on the mornings when you haven’t washed

it the nights before. It sprawls my left cheek like a web

sprawls tree branches because you have moved so near to me.

When you have moved so near to me in the night, your hair

suffocating this day’s first breath, curling your thumb at the base

of my neck, the way a kitten taken from her mother too soon

curls her paws into any softness, I cannot help myself.

When you are curling your thumb at the base of my neck,

your breath so warm saturating the deepest well of my ear,

I lift my heavy hand and I take one long coil of hair

from your neck, and I wrap it and unwrap it in my fingers,

and I lift it to my nose, though I smell it already,

though it has already stopped my breath, I lay it across my mouth.

And I wrote this one...in between:

In Spirit

We are afraid she is not touching the bed,

our mother, levitating again,

lifting in her old bones lying

there, her mothballed nightgown

inflating as if it were a great

lung, her whole body pitching itself

to the slope of her voice, coming up

out of her like the fin of a fish

cutting the dark surface of water:

Do not kill me.

Our tongues are stuck to our teeth

while her voice stretches to us,

standing around her in suits, black,

we were tired, until she came at us

in spirit, yes,

is she here?

Her body lies on the bed, and I think of sliding

my hand beneath her shoulder blades just to see,

just to see if she has died yet.

I hope you enjoy them.