Mockingbird II
Covering the Mirrors
Animal Time
a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk.
In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie,
I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening
through water, even the high-pitched drone of the
cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing.
As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to
Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York,
the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations
of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides.
They camped under stars that meant no harm.
It was the silence that alerted them to danger.
They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked
its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.
Admiral Nimitz
Laundromat
Nothing can brighten this laundromat,
not the fake ivy strung like a clothesline
across its middle, washers on one side,
dryers on the other, nor the framed
jigsaw puzzles under smeared glass.
Germanic villages with steepled churches
and quaint squares tucked sleepily
against the chards of mountains. .
Tiles broken and missing, as if the
floor had hosted dance parties after the doors
were locked, the machines’ lids lowered.
The twirling stilettos wore it down.
In this giant room on the last Sunday of the year
Guatemalan grandmothers with impossibly
long braids stuff their clothes into the machines,
a locked determination on their faces,
one more obstacle to fight.
While their children watch cartoons,
squeezed into tiny apartments, as the men
drag home without finding work.
I look around, tall in contrast to the other women.
The washers and dryers chatter noisily,
firing up, shaking their hips, flinging wide their mouths.
Oh the stories they could tell,
if only someone would stop to listen.
The Woman Afraid of Buttons
and why not,
when I back away from the elevator,
convinced its open mouth
is waiting to bite me?
Perhaps as a baby
her mother shook her three times,
until her organs shifted in their pockets
her mother’s voice ascending
a ladder of panic, the kitchen air slivered
as the infant turned blue.
Now we happen upon one another.
My blouse with its triplets of buttons,
the kind a Victorian lover would stumble over
on the road to the forbidden.
I never noticed her clothes buttonless,
only the oversized earrings gaudy as a shout,
how her body shrinks beneath them. .
Staring, she shudders as she greets me,
turns away. I follow her gaze out into the street
up to the drawer of the sky that darkens
as buttons of hail clatter to the sidewalk.
Bindweed
A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Call it morning glory, convolvulus arvenis,
and people smile, thinking of purple suns strung across a field.
Standing on my back stairs this summer morning ,
I am filled with hate toward this choking vine that can live 20 years.
John Dunmire, expert gardener, cautions that bindweed
can send up 1,000 plants in a flower bed,
squatters invading a vegetable garden.
I am in such a fight for life as this noxious vine
strangles my rose bushes, Australian myrtle, the fuchsias.
It loops across the lawn to bind its phylacteries
around the branches of the orange tree.
For months I wrestle the bindweed, pull its tentacles,
smother its outbursts, starve its roots.
I scream curses enough to scare the gods,
(as well as the neighbors), but the plant twists tighter.
And though I fed my children only on the breast,
I dream of herbicides to poison the bindweed’s tissue,
brown streaks snaking up its limbs like tetanus.
Its torso shriveling to a gnarled pit.
Let the woody stems be coated, the leafy greens
glimmer with glyphosate. I’ll brush on triclopyr,
paint the offshoots with dicamba, leave voodoo dolls at its feet.
Make the bindweed suffer until it pleads with me
to die and be done with it.
The soup years
Although it is early
with only the garbage truck awake,
its empty stomach growling
from down the alley,
the heat already presses on the city
like the weight my mother used
to flatten chicken breasts.
Her bony hands (fingers impossibly long
and too fragile for strength)
pounded and flayed that pink flesh,
stretching half a pound of meat into a meal for four.
Those were the soup years of my childhood
pots of hot borsch we were ordered to finish
even mid-August, down to the orphaned
bay leaf at the bottom.
And the golubtsi – little pigeons –
with cabbage leaf wings wrapped
around a bland, tomato-rice filling.
Later she shed the much-stewed vegetables
of the immigrant kitchen, for raw ones, full
of snap and color. She embraced this
new cooking with the allegiance
of the converted, for in America
food fills more than the stomach.
Then she stopped yelling in Yiddish
when I spilled my milk for the third time in a week.
Between Storms
My clunker car inches along
like the tail of a rattler trying
to whip up its fury.
Ahead of me an orange jeep, a copperhead sunning.
A sweep of clouds darkens the sky.
On either side of the traffic
the canyon walls are growing.
The heavens could open now,
lightning bounce from the cheekbones of rocks.
Scrub acorns sprout from the hillsides,
its stubble of beard sways unsteadily.
I did not believe I could bring back the dead,
though now they slide on to the back seat
as I round a sharp corner.
My brother shifts in the bones of his teenage body,
gazes out the window ignoring the conversation.
My mother in matching pumps and purse,
face bright before the illness that took away its color.
My father leans forward, cautions me to slow down.
A red tailed hawk loops and dips above.
It urges me to follow closely.
The road widens.
This Month in Michigan
It is not enough to say there was a before and after
Call it exile,
off a rural road named Main, on the edge
of a small lake that chants all night.
At the Dollar Store an empty-handed girl waits
behind me in line, finally blurting: Are you hiring?
She’s too young for such a hardened stare,
even with lids half-closed turquoise petals.
The GM factory up Highway 91 out on strike again.
By the roadside the line workers’ placards wobble like loose teeth.
This winter harsh enough to shred barns.
Come spring the rivers will swell till they topple their banks.
Still it’s Michigan where I seek refuge, perhaps optimistic
as those who plant before the last freeze.
An act of faith, as surely as the photos taped to the cash register;
amulets to protect the town’s boys from harm in Iraq.
There is so much that threatens an early bloom:
neglect, disease, the before and the after.
Eating Crow
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,
The steer’s head displayed like
crown jewels on the butcher table,
put me off meat that year in Russia,
but no more than the intestines
ladled into a pond of broth
On tv a the food show host leans over
a rickety market stall in Bangkok.
He picks at the toothpick bones of a sparrow,
licks his lips and reaches for a second bird,
its skeleton the size of his palm.
A cook to a medieval knight placed
live birds inside a pastry crust.
A great joke, though the real pie was served
after the birds had been released.
Is that how we got the four and twenty blackbirds
whose heads pop through a blanket of pie crust?
Beaks wide to sing their hearts out,
though they are cooked through and through.
In the Middle Ages pea-fowl was required
on any table worth its weight.
These birds wore a mantel of herbs,
green as a king’s velvet collar.
I succumb to the occasional hamburger dripping with juice.
Still I wanted to rescue those little birds
from their pinched cages before
they met their deaths in a bath of oil.
To take the fingers of the food show host,
smack them away, before he licked them clean.
Marshland
We are all intruders here
though we fool ourselves this late winter day,
carving a place on the banks
to anchor our heels.
We stretch over the water, hoping
to slip onto the wings of a Great Blue Heron
but afraid to get caught in the trap of reeds, twisting
in the foul water.
The marsh ignites: will а wisps,
sprites, a wisp of flames,
torches held aloft by villagers
marching on the manor.
We’ve read too many fairytales
but this much is true:
I heard voices.
Not the call of a willet or clapper rail
but a child caught beneath the ceiling of water
the thin reed of its voice
rising in the brackish light.
Plumeria
for Antoinette
Calm down.
That the moon has always hung
by a thread expecting to be snipped
is a given. Your daughter
will call when she is ready.
There is no need for hysteria.
A beach ball held under water
will always shoot into the crackling air.
No one can stop it.
While you wait, feed the plumeria,
even if its awning is bolted shut for the winter.
You’ve got to believe in something.
You could do worse than to have faith
in the unfurling of petals.
Bleak with Trees
1
What would you have bid on, if you could?
An antler wine rack waiting to be reunited with its head?
The cane with a bone handle carved by an old ranch hand?
Or the divining rod that for years has failed to find
water in this remote Wyoming valley?
2
My friend hauled out a heat lamp each October
the two years she lived in a farmhouse in Maine.
She stretched out on her couch practicing for the coffin.
Phone calls from friends could not protect her from the dark
but the coils of heat and burning light rescued her.
3
This morning, scraps of snow, the hillside a cowboy’s
cheek with a scruffy beard of silver sagebrush.
His shaving hand no longer trustworthy, the razor’s path
on his chin traces the geography of the moon with
patches of dark stubble rising from it.
4
If I could choose any location, I’d take bleak with trees,
silhouetted mountains, a gulley for porcupines.
This high desert with its sumac and bitterbrush scares me.
Nowhere to hide; just look up Hwy. 14 at Crazy Shirley’s
with her four shacks, three horses and too many cars to count.
5
I’ve made mistakes, run away repeatedly in another language.
For years I’ve pushed in vain against solid doors.
Maybe those first months confined to an incubator launched me
on the wrong path; now I’d choose shadow over those lights.
A prairie view, my salvation.
