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Bringing
the Baby Over
Dust
falls in the window-light
as
I shake out the rugs.
My
ex enters, kisses my cheek and lays down
the
other man's baby.
She's
tired today, she says, and it is cold,
but
her cheeks glow.
The
window is open too wide and the wind
rustles
newspapers on the table.
I
approach Aria, the baby—too small
to
reveal features of a man I've never met.
I
find only her mother's blondness, a few freckles.
It
was sudden,
she said. And
we promised to stay
always
friends. I
said. Showing the girls out,
I
want to present gift—animal crackers, maybe.
But
I'm sure my shelves are bare,
and
besides, Aria hasn't grown a tooth.
A
low, calcium-bursting cloud hovers
over
their car as they drive off—a perfect
oval,
but for a missing curve. I remember now
how
she'd devour an entire Granny Smith apple,
savoring
its dark seeds. And her knack
to
blink slowly, to acknowledge yes, the universe
plodded
us this way, to this juncture, this.
I
close the front door.
And
in place of a biological end,
minor
intimacies draw my way.
A
painting tilted in the living room, that's one.
In
it, the drifts of snow sloping along
a
barn, stark and sturdy. The pint
of
sweet applesauce I find, later, inside the cupboard.
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Turnpike
We
learn the ipod is dead
passing
refineries fogged in summer rain,
the
highway trees. Inside,
we
must resemble the other passengers
whose
necks bow as cut sunflowers.
Every
stranger handles silence,
just
as woodland creatures
shuck
and scuttle the shells of acorns,
and
come the muzzled cacophony
of
throat-clearings, the varieties
crow-like,
marvelous, civil.
My
scapula—handle-bar of the chest,
object
of your bus-time rest—
hardly
cushions when sleep comes.
Shoulders
be fleshier and the dusk
bluer
if it must be gray,
to
buttress us. We leave
New
York and its handsome ugliness.
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