Poetry

My wife, over food you thought of me again. How do I know? I can taste you still in this glass of water.

     An old woman likes to melt her husband. She puts him in a melting device, and he pours out the other end in a hot bloody syrup, which she catches in a series of little husband molds.      What splatters on the floor the dog licks up.      When they have set she has seventeen little husbands….

There is nothing so scary about grasshoppers sharpening scythes. But when the troll’s flea whispers, be careful.

Odd — to watch you drive off with your kind, redhaired boyfriend just as two girls in braids go by on ponies down the sunny street, laughing at nothing at all, their clip-clop sound the same my pipe makes, knocking the ash from its empty bowl.

     A woman prepared a mouse for her husband’s dinner, roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.     At table he uses a dentist’s pick and a surgeon’s scalpel, bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler’s loupe . . .      Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter mouse, mouse sauteed in its…

The front a mirror. The back a picture of the Garden of Eden. A strange find of the old master of glass.

My daughter gives me her treasure, a stone-glass bead. And I give her my treasure — I accept her stone-glass bead.

    An elephant went to bed and pulled a crazy quilt up under its tusks.     But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray wrinkles of sleep it was awakened by the thud of its tail falling out of bed.     Would you get my tail? said the elephant to another…

These calm days of September with their sun. It’s time to harvest. There are still clumps of cranberries in the woods, reddening rosehips by the stone walls, hazel nuts coming loose, and clusters of black berries shine in the bushes, thrushes look around for the last currants and wasps fasten on to the sweetening plums….