Photo by Leah Fowler
They Have Taken Away My Good Mirrors
(1)
They have taken away my good mirrors,
these three: heart-sisters all, dead in one year.
Custodian of guilty pleasures: tucked in flannel sheets
we watched What not to wear. Her transparent hands.
While she could, she read me her poems,
told me her husband would blame me later.
Oh my madcaps, my wordsmiths, who will remember the corkscrew?
Who will finish my sentences?
Fog blots the evening, dissolves destinations. Mist coating my cheeks.
I fall into dreams of fog and absence.
It is time to furnish the silences. A course, perhaps. A bookclub.
Spring bulbs for the balcony, papery in the cold soil.
(2)
My tall son, radiant with rage,
has stalked off down a different road.
A late wasp thrums the window.
The downy pulse of his eggshell skull, his mango skin.
Stealthy bones, stretching to boyhood.
Cumbersome heart: creaks open like an old traveling trunk
stuffed with this burdensome love.
Can’t hold it gingerly between my two palms
As I might hold your face.
(3)
I’m on the no-fly list. Graceless times, and twelve-year-old Olivers in the stockroom.
A homeless man puts his head on my shoulder, says I’m so lonely.
Street lights stutter the rain. All evening the city’s starveling hopes
gather in doorways.
Behind scaffolding, like dorm-boys after lights-out,
men in sleeping bags and plastic read by flashlight.
A moon like the ring a glass leaves on varnish.
They have taken away my good mirrors,
these three: heart-sisters all, dead in one year.
Custodian of guilty pleasures: tucked in flannel sheets
we watched What not to wear. Her transparent hands.
While she could, she read me her poems,
told me her husband would blame me later.
Oh my madcaps, my wordsmiths, who will remember the corkscrew?
Who will finish my sentences?
Fog blots the evening, dissolves destinations. Mist coating my cheeks.
I fall into dreams of fog and absence.
It is time to furnish the silences. A course, perhaps. A bookclub.
Spring bulbs for the balcony, papery in the cold soil.
(2)
My tall son, radiant with rage,
has stalked off down a different road.
A late wasp thrums the window.
The downy pulse of his eggshell skull, his mango skin.
Stealthy bones, stretching to boyhood.
Cumbersome heart: creaks open like an old traveling trunk
stuffed with this burdensome love.
Can’t hold it gingerly between my two palms
As I might hold your face.
(3)
I’m on the no-fly list. Graceless times, and twelve-year-old Olivers in the stockroom.
A homeless man puts his head on my shoulder, says I’m so lonely.
Street lights stutter the rain. All evening the city’s starveling hopes
gather in doorways.
Behind scaffolding, like dorm-boys after lights-out,
men in sleeping bags and plastic read by flashlight.
A moon like the ring a glass leaves on varnish.
