It's the only way to be
You live for love, don't you, said the friend.
I don't remember what I said, but I know
at once I recalled Judit, who had offered
her delicate tattooed forearm to me
as if she were offering tea and scones.
Auschwitz, Birkenau, Hessisch Lichtenau—
she'd come through, somehow,
unbowed and unbroken and
radiant with the rarest kindness, born only
from the unimaginable.
When I traced the cruel inked numerals
steeped in her rice paper skin I wept.
She smiled and hushed me gently.
Which one do you play?
she asked me.
We were thespians then, a new show
in Portland, Maine, resistance fighters
of the Holocaust, my hair shorn
to a half-inch. Which one are you?
she repeated. Guess, I had said.
One look into my eyes, sad despite
so very much luck, such fortune
(and those were the happy times).
You are the young lover, are you not?
Yes. I can see it. You, the beautiful
young lover. I can tell. One of the other
actors spoke then: She's our own
Isabella Rossellini.
Judit sighed. Ah, to be the lover.
She patted my cheek,
touched my lips with trembling hand.
It's the only way to be.
He hadn't asked for orchids
On the table in the home they have shared
for more years than I am old,
he serves pancakes, his specialty,
golden and certain and round.
She is with us, surely, we know it and we don't.
Your pillow
Your pillow, my love
lies untouched, tells me nothing.
No mail, no call. Who?
I am big, it's the pictures that got small
All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup.
You could tell her
You could tell her that someday she'll be standing at a sink
scrubbing the three-day old pot, thinking about a boy
she used to know but doesn't dare mention.
Daily news
Last night Sir James came upstairs for the first time. In life, his bad hips prevented him from making the climb. At bedtime, I gently carried his floral tin of ashes to my room and set him by the bed. I placed one smooth black stone from Iceland on the tin.
You don't come around
You don't come around,
she says
over her basket of clean laundry
below the horizon of clothesline
and rose gold. She doesn't know
what tone to take anymore so
her fingers do the talking now,
sifting through her apron pocket
of wooden clothespin soldiers.
C'mon talk
Oh, Jarle, my Norwegian earworm!
The not-asking
When you ask her
where her shoes are,
she tells you finally,
haltingly
that she's outgrown
them all.
Turns out she's been wearing her
battered, torn snowboots to class
for two months, maybe three.
She's been wearing them
all the time, whatever the weather.
Valentine to my songbird
"Are you crying?" asks my songbird.
She leans in my bedroom doorway wrapped in a bath towel. Damp and pale and shining, she has just emerged from what she would call an "epical" (epic + magical) shower, where she's been singing for 45 minutes.
Argument against a virtue
The mug of white warmed milk. The overbred, ribboned dog. The kiss unkissed, or too dry, too tame. This life belongs to the wretched, the dirty. There's no sense in mending it, not now. Your life is no less or more a life than that of the woman hanging her husband's bleached boxers in the sun for the sixtieth, seventieth, hundredth time. What she remembers, you will never know.
Blonde ambitions
More fun, please, with a side
of ombré and razoring.
Tell no one of my dark past,
my ashy roots, mined silver.
It's my hair and I can curl
if I want to. You know what
they say about the little girl
with the curl in the middle
of her forehead, or you don't.
Chopped, cropped, ready
to co-opt stray laughter,
impertinent glances,
insouciant thinking, even
a bit of winking. Bring on
the parade of unremembrance,
rainbows all bows, no rain.
Dear
Dear, I made a pot roast last night in the slow cooker. I added vegetables, because vegetables are en vogue, if the food shows I watch are to be trusted. I shaved parsnips and carrots and made them smooth. I tried to imagine your face, the soft skin below the prickly indignant stubble. Maybe the only stubble you have is on your legs. Dear, if you would only write or call or find me in this great big world, I would know such things.
How to keep moving
You can tell the sun to fuck off all you want, but it won't. I was here first, it will only argue, and you don't want to get into THAT conversation again.
Try blasphemy
Shake things up.
Give blasphemy a whirl.
Breaking news
This just in:
King Richard III has been sleeping off
the winter of his discontent just below
the concrete of a municipal parking lot
in Leicester.