A Doll’s House
To enter she has to get on her hands and knees
to crawl through the front door which naturally
is tight for her. The floors burn her knees.
Once in the front room she can crouch
or when she gets tired of that she can bend over
sideways at the waist enough to clear the ceilings
and of course even lower for the doorways. She bangs
her head on the light fixtures often enough.
Afternoons he likes to have her
serve tea in the tiniest china cups, her fingers
too clumsy for the handles, her thirst
much greater than their capacity.
The clothes he likes her in chafe
and leave marks. He calls her Ducky
the way she waddles in them.
There are no chairs big enough
for her to sit in so she kneels
and when she gets up
which requires his permission
if she winces or even sighs
she prays for a reprimand
because there’s worse.
Reclamation
My arms full of washed out
peanut butter jars and other
pampered recyclables,
I’m mistaken for a mother
by the trash man, although
I may also be mistaken
for he is immaculate,
appearing on the running board
of a steamy blue truck on a Friday.
Happy Mother’s Day!
he proclaims buoyantly,
his voice, raspy from talking
over the grind of gears, a dirty job
hauling everyday empties away,
and in return he’s joy,
a kind of minister, unsullied.
I don’t correct him,
handing over my cans and jars.
I scrubbed them til they gleam
like it’s the first day of school.
Correcting for Death
I play this character
Dead Judith on the call-sheet.
With a paint gun, a makeup specialist in effects
sprays a dead person’s face
on my face.
Steady, with brushes made of a single eyelash,
hand mixed color concoctions are applied
correcting for death.
Stria, for coagulation under the skin.
The mottled freckling of an overripe peach for blood splash.
A sculpted bullet hole in my temple.
An exit wound weeping syrup out my cheek.
Grips remove the rearview mirror
from the 3/4 ton pick-up where I am slaughtered.
Not for my sake,
for the camera angle.
I’m in an onion field.
Gore drips off the shattered passenger-side window.
Brains puddle on the Naugahyde seat.
Lunch isn’t for hours:
we’ll be on this shot forever.
Summer Calling
for John O’Keefe
One season we played nuns, enough to get the feel,
novice actresses yoked to made-up vows,
we bore the marks of wool for weeks,
our skin mercerized in the sunny rehearsal heat—
black gabardine, white challis, black head kerchiefs,
the rubbed-raw badges the costumes chafed
onto our thighs, our wimple-rashed cheeks.
Tested, the long pent-up day of pretend vocation
no lesser devotion, we were cut loose in a red clay field,
the cooling sacrament, dusk,
told to write loud on a clean red slate, we formed a kick line,
a cancan in reverse, receding as we curtsied
singing close, a choir of showgirls
charming the fat moon to rise.
We, of the cloth, gone the way of soft rags,
of unanswered rosaries, attended a July reunion,
and up we popped, in unison, as sisters do, forgetting time,
as if strings never untied from habits.
First, we lifted our pretend skirts, our arms akimbo just so,
then without a sideways glance,
set about our magic-seeming backwards trot,
away from our attachments, the trapping world,
our silhouettes scudding like pirate ships
toward the smog rosy light.
Cream
It’s my Tuesday custom to walk by that place on the way to the farmer’s market. I am soothed by seasonal turnover—silhouette portraits on sale at Groundhog’s Day; next up, Valentine boxer shorts; strawberries before rhubarb before figs. I know tests for best—the freckliest, teen-fuzziest peaches have secret sugar, the lowliest apricots about to turn to mush produce brandy approaching the finest cognac.
Bone
It runs in my family, the love of the shabby genteel, the fostering of underdogs. I married wearing a broken-in vintage frock. Saved, ironed into a precise rectangle, and tucked between layers of acid-free tissue—the second-hand floor length gown with train that my sisters saw me try on and burst into tears: handkerchief cotton batiste, mother-of-pearl buttons like a row of peas all the way down the spine, lace choking up at the throat. Never materialized, the daughter I saved it for.
Champagne
The lady at Parisian dry cleaners, a bridal gown spécialiste, employed mortuary words to assure me that the eternity keepsake box in which my dress, propped up on cardboard breasts, was vacuum-sealed and came with a lifetime guarantee. Which lifetime, or whose? The marriage, that’s some-zing else, she said. Love is more than a late-night snack. I don’t wonder. My husband’s not one for staying up—oldest son of a French-speaking farmer, he’s awake before cows are.