The Business of a Clean Sweep
Her address is the hollow house, innards
stacked unsteady against the far wall.
The white truck stops. Port opens. A tentacle
snakes its giant octopus arm across the lawn
humming,
up three steps into the living room It’s off to work...
to steam below the puddle of sunshine that washes
through the open door highlighting carpet
like a Sir Walter Raleigh cloak-of-light.
Revealing underfoot an Achilles’ Heel: yesterday
tromping tear stains of spilt milk.
She scans the house’s bones too late
to repair
even with this broom of moist breath.
Flicked off the tentacle crawls down three steps
across the lawn
humming a penny earned is ...
The port inhales the arm.
She closes her door
lock latch snaps
...a silk purse out of a sows ear.
The truck packs it up, cleans empty rooms
all across the city
every day. hi-ho hi-ho...
The Night House
A neighborhood mother was murdered
last month. Now it’s an issue of light.
A night light locates the budding and dying
potted plants on the kitchen bay window,
just enough illumination to assure no ogre
from my leftover childhood imagination
smolders in the corners or behind the door.
All night streetlamps glow from outside.
Drab light outside and dim inside press like page
against a page to create creepy shapes.
But sometimes the dark goes velvet. I come downstairs
barefoot and slowly, familiar but not familiar.
My nerve fumbles and I swallow.
Nothing in the dark except what is there
when it’s day. Damn dark! Hides behind,
over and under itself to twist what I believe
into half truths. Simply an issue of light.
Hands tied behind her back, murdered
in her house in the middle
of a sun saturated morning and the police
still in the dark look for clues.
University Weather
for Sage
Thursday, the seventeenth of May.
A black and gray discomforter of clouds
and a sharp south wind threaten
raindrops hefty enough
to stomp the sweet-pea sprouts.
The storm like bursts of engine backfire
doesn’t alarm our freshman grand-
daughter until a dozen sirens shriek
below her dorm window. The window
between rock-red & roll posters,
the window of the room where
her stuffed bear, last survivor
of childhood sleeps
on a down-heaped bed.
Below the window
her music professor, crumples,
murdered, blood steaming the grass.
The shooter then shoots
himself. Rain
won’t revive them.
The weather-man explains it’s a random
storm, the temperature’s
not so hot this May.
Clinic Wait
Eight thirty the start of the day after
Thanksgiving in the Polyclinic. Silence
without canned music
soothes the room
with no patients. Five sets
of chair arms’ cold gray plastic
embrace mauve cushions that could be
rosy tongues in famished
open mouths.
By the computer behind the desk
a receptionist is crying whispers
and wiping tears into the receiver.
Magazines sport covers,
Gourmet, Money, Life,
stacked from May to November their
advice waits while purple carpet mutes
an occasional whish of white
coat bustling by.
The doctor’s door is closed. Viktor
from Vladivostok, the visiting actor
whose voice animates audiences,
is in an exam.
He’s hearing
how long he has to wait
till his tissue
deteriorates, how soon
his sojourn will expire.
The Baroness of Ballard
Gentle Brian, at the hospice,
lets light in and gathers-up
the Baroness of Ballard’s hand.
Her frail palm in his big paw
the way his, nested long ago
in hers. He says
everyone around here
is dying but she is hanging-on.
Christine said, John’s mom
waited hours to consummate
her penultimate goodbye. Slipped off
only after Johnny’s business day
was done. Jessie says her dad
has two days or so to go.
Kay writes that Hugh is hanging
by a thread, and Jan’s mother’s
blood carries clots
slowly toward her heart.
Shoko’s rushing back to Tokyo.
Tell them buds are swelling
on plum trees, softening
thorns turning pink.
Tell them February days
are getting brighter, it’s
the month dark
begins to dissipate.
What Song of Songs?
Did you sing to your baby boy from the Bible you borrowed
as his life throbbed into the dining room rug,
a soft mass of matter? Did you sing psalms not rhymes
nor Vedic chants-- your angelic voice
a cushion to quiet him until he was perfectly quiet?
When you pierced did you cut slowly or slash, the blade
dull or keen, left wrist not right? Did you sing
your own overture before you resumed
bloodletting humming making yourself
not matter, a sticky red sea?