Face to Face
Today at Bible study I saw Carol
for the first time since her cataract
surgery;
had the uncomfortable feeling
that she was seeing me for the first time:
just as I am, without one plea.
I regretted punctuations
on my chin from a hasty shave,
and hoped my fly was up:
no evidence of Adam’s fall.
Now she goes home wondering:
kinder to tell a friend, or not?
She doesn’t need superfluous glasses.
Her world has detail suddenly,
she says, and the detail shows flaws:
more spoiled children than she realized.
Neighbors she thought were young—
wrinkled. Mold on the roses, not dew,
the kitchen somewhat less clean
than Bob had led her to believe.
Waking Early
Cartoonish beep-beeps of backing trucks
in the lumber yard awaken birds—and me,
legs sweaty from a dream I don’t recall,
except that it explained everything.
When alarms go off on the dementia floor
at Rainbow View, the residents
are trying to get out of beds or chairs.
Aides take turns settling Mother down
for another ninety seconds of composure.
I nap, and in a vision receive words
to make the position clear to you—
but am unable to remember now.
I picture you about to leave Ohio
for Indiana on the Interstate, your license
brand-new in your purse, Jason somewhere
in Indianapolis, your head starting to nod.
Perspiration spangles my shoulder blades.
The cell phone does its music box
William Tell. As always when I want
and need it to be you, it’s someone else.
Mr. Hardisty
An old man can’t have affairs; doesn’t wish
them, really. It is enough to lie
on his narrow bed, clutch fantasies
with crooked fingers to a pallid chest.
Waiting for whatever will happen at
the urinal, an old man gets to think.
He wonders, for instance, if he might
have explained his intentions differently.
As usual, little girls gather around
in the park: “Mr. Hardisty, Mr. Hardisty!”
Look what I found underneath the trees,
see what I got on the history quiz today—
even the ones obviously growing up
keep that breathless eagerness for his
attention. And his prostate is
telling him it’s almost time to go.
He’d like to dance with the dolly
with the holes in her stocking.
She cut them herself: it’s the fashion.
But she races off—a horn is honking.
Flower Girl, Three
She made it down the aisle, in miniature
elegance and without tears, but disdained
to hold her tuxedoed brother’s hand.
Except for all the photos that at least
the top of her head appears in, probably
she will not remember, ten years hence:
how once she was the flower girl, the girl
of flowers. How her eyelids shamed
the petals that she dropped. How none
of the expensive altar arrangements
was colored like her cheeks. How when
she spoke at all you savored baby’s breath.
How she was the most beautiful, passing
even the bride in her dishonest white,
and the most ephemeral, as we know
one can’t stay three forever, or even
to the happy couple’s first anniversary.
A flower girl is always the first to go.
La Fille du Regiment
“If the title, ‘Daughter of the
Regiment,’
sounds faintly naughty, it shouldn’t,
for in the opera the heroine, Marie,
is impregnably chaste and pure.”
—LP album liner notes
Augustine’s purity of heart, perhaps: to
will
one thing. Chaste amid unsanitary
conditions.
But not impregnable. Deliriums
of choleric sufferers got through to her.
She would enter tents where she heard
groans.
For the illiterate, she wrote letters home.
It didn’t matter if the shot soldier’s head
rolled between her bosoms. It might mean
something to the soldier’s head, of course.
“Maman” was the last word of many,
their swaggers shredded by explosive shells;
the surgeons hiding up their own rear ends.
