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The
Dream of the Rotten Daughter Originally
published in Field On the night
of the day she buried her
mother her father
turned to her from the grip
of an old photograph,
her six-year dead daddy,
swiveled his bullet head,
nailing her to him with a blood-shot sniggery eye, then stuck out his
tongue. She woke up laughing,
recognizing the title of
this poem before she
wrote it, there on the point
of that red wad where he’d
honed it all those years,
slipping it in between her
ribs when she least expected. It was his label for
her from the time of
the big bed Sunday
mornings, and she between them
pretending oblivion, a
balled- up cuddle to
bridge their unbridgeable
gap. Or (speak truth,
oh rotten one) usurp the
I’m-here-first of that furious
eye. Old news, old
news. Tell it another
way. Make it a Halloween
story, Poe
story—ghouls, spiders, cellars and
foul air. Two dolls in their
boxes, laid side by side
like people bewitched in
an iron sleep and a ghost
with a blood eye and a butcher’s
tongue who cut his
way into his daughter’s
dream to say of the newly
dead, Boo! I won.
I’ve got her now. ************************** Diapers
for My Father Originally
published in The Ohio Review Pads or pull-ons—that is the
question. Whether to buy pads dangled
from straps fastened with
buttons or Velcro— pads rising
like a bully’s cup stiff as
pommel with stickum backs to stick in
briefs. Or, dear God, the whole
thing rubberized, size 38 in
apple green, with or without
elastic leg. Or the kind, I swear, with
an inside pocket to tuck a
penis in—little resume in a
folder. Old mole, weeping his one eye
out at the tunnel’s end. The clerk is
nothing but patience practiced with
sympathy. Her eyes soak
up everything. In ten minutes
she’s my cotton batting, my triple
panel, triple shield—my Depends against the
hour of the mop: skeleton with a sponge
mouth dry as a grinning brick waiting in the
closet. She carries my
choices to the register, sighing the
floor with each step. I follow, absorbed
away to nothing. How could
Hamlet know what flesh is heir to? Ask Claudius,
panicky in his theft, hiding in the
garden where it all began or behind the
arras, stuffing furbelows from
Gertrude’s old court dress into his codpiece. Or better, ask
Ophelia, daughter too of a foolish,
mean-mouthed father, who launched
herself like a boat of blotters only to be
pulled babbling under the runaway stream. ************************** Snow Originally
published in The Georgia Review Let us speak
of love and weather subtracting
nothing. Let us put
your mother and mine away for a
while. Your dying father, my dead one. Let us
watch from our
bedroom window how a slow falling snow
crowns all nakedness in ermine. Do not look at
me yet. Your face is flushed, your eyes too
love-soaked, too blue. Outside is
white on black and
still. The sky, deaf with stillness. Don’t let it
frighten you. Hush. There’s time enough for that. Be content for
now to watch the maples fill with
snow, how they spread themselves, each naked
limb making itself accessible. |
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