Harvest
for Donna
I didn’t know I loved the yard in fall,
slant sunlight upon this luxurious death,
our house bronzed in the afternoons
before daylight savings.
Birds offer a praise tune when you least expect it,
just when you thought they’d all gone.
Yes, that’s the gift of it: the giving up
into flowers, fruit, and song,
gold flotsam, chocolate branches, unchosen edibles
bolting into something tall and tough with petals.
This could be the way with us,
moving on, relieved of our birthing,
regally flapping our rusty foliage in the wind,
sending out blooms in the off hours.
~
My father steals band aids
Slack-mouthed survivor of strokes
veteran of actual wars
beggar in a blood-stained shirt
and unzipped pants
My fleshy-handed crook
rifles through the glass jar of band aids
waits for the doctor
undeterred by the nurse at the door
Take one, dad. Take them all
Hero stripes to clot your losses
~
Generosity
Last year toy boats and farm animals
bobbed under the bathtub mirror adjusted
to her bubble beards and soaped-up brows.
These days she reads in quiet water,
washes her hair by candlelight.
She invites me for a foot massage
insisting, Don’t Look! as she raises
her young body, unguarded, from
her warm watery cover, even though
I’ve been there all along admiring
her steamy shrine, the shine of her.
I sling my bristly legs and knobby feet
over the cold edge of the tub,
shins suspended above her pool.
She takes up the washcloth in silent concentration,
applies her favorite cinnamon soap.
She gently bathes each toe and wrinkled sole.
~
~
Thirteen
Around the corner from my parents’ store
Mr. Jarvis gives lesson on the clarinet,
an instrument I never liked
but that’s what I got when
they ran out of flutes at my school.
I have to screw the clarinet together
while Mr. Jarvis watches, but
I make sure to lick the reed at home
because I don’t like the way he stares,
how he doesn’t talk to me
except to say How’s your embouchure,
which he knows is really bad because
my mouth collapses down at the sides
after about twenty seconds and this
spitty hollow sound comes out plus actual spit.
Don’t tell anybody but
the reason I’m here is because
Ronnie Lovett’s in the marching band and he looks so cute
in the red and black uniform with the shoulder string
things,
especially when he fainted
at the Memorial Day parade.
Mr. Jarvis’s lips are too red for a man.
I’d like to stop taking lessons.
I’d like to not be thirteen and just
be a nice older age
like twenty-one
or a single digit
like nine.
