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than even you
have at your disposal to find out why.
The same and not the same, this venue fascinates,
spiriting you through closed familiar doors
on random unremarkable evenings when
you will have been gone
for how long? — Just a bit longer than your successors
have had to make these premises their own.
However much their climate-controlled rooms
glow vibrant with halogen, they will not see you.
But they may wonder why, for no clear reason,
they find their thoughts so often drawn to the past.
Back Again
The wormy apple tree
we chainsawed to a stump
is not content to be
a barren amputee.
It has produced a clump
of rank and spindly shoots,
a thicket still unthinned,
each one a witch’s wand,
suggesting that the roots
regard our surgery
as one more hostile thing
to overcome in spring,
like parried blades of wind —
mischief to live beyond.
A Bowl of Stone Fruit
Never forget the child’s face, nonplused
on touching first an apple, then a pear,
then a banana, his bewildered stare
becoming peevish as his buoyant trust
in the appearances that grown-ups prize
founders. Items for which his taste buds lusted
are for display, and regularly dusted.
Try to explain how people feast their eyes
on such a centerpiece, how they are able
to cherish a quartz peach, whose blushing skin
is bonded pigment, stone bearing within
no stone a tree would spring from. Now the table
stands taller than his head; but watch him grow,
to grow unflustered by the cold and hard
baubles adult taste holds in fond regard.
Never forget his face, first made to know.
Airs and Graces
All this was years ago — back in the days
of afternoon visits between ladies
with children brought along, resigned to boredom.
Her mother always stayed for a second cup;
her mother’s aunt, happy to be a hostess,
kept pressing macaroons on her niece
and grand-niece (something neither of them favored).
It always seemed to be raining when they went there
and there was no dog or cat to play with.
When the women were tired of glancing sideways
to see her fidgeting or shedding crumbs,
they’d send her to the spare room to explore
the Dress-Up Box. This could be interesting
if she was in the mood for vintage glamour.
The Box was really a modest-sized tin trunk,
lined with flowered wallpaper and filled
with bits of swank from several decades back.
There were a few dresses, much too large,
trimmed with velvet and imbued with camphor.
It was the accessories she was drawn to.
There was a pair of white gloves that on her
were almost elbow-length. The missing buttons
forced her to bunch them at her wrists, so that
she looked like a Walt Disney character.
There were various paper-and-bamboo fans
with orchids and pagodas painted on them.
She fanned her face with these and made her bangs flap.
What else? A pin made of a real seashell,
a set of tortoise-shell combs, a rhinestone bracelet.
More intriguing: an oblong of black lace,
a shawl or a mantilla, that she always
spread out before her eyes while she decided
just how to drape it. Looking through its fine,
close-knotted mesh gave her a view like one
she could have got through a sooty window screen.
Two or three hats with feathers of no color
she’d ever seen on a bird sat carefully nested.
Best of all, always to be admired,
there was a brown, weaselly-looking fur piece,
that ringed her neck and dangled down her front,
the eyes studding its narrow nut of a head
inky black and hard as rock, the nose
rubbery-feeling like an old eraser.
A little chain could cinch the snout and tail
together, but the fixed jaws wouldn’t bite.
There, in the little stuffy almost-attic,
trying these in their different combinations
before a mirror, practicing to be old
and regal, she could lose track of the time.
She grew oblivious to the parlor voices
talking about people she’d never known.
Finally, when her appearance satisfied her,
she paced grandly down, the funeral veil
swathing her hair, the spineless animal
bobbling to her waist. Her mother gasped
and clapped her hands. Her great-aunt smiled briefly,
then looked into her teacup. Years would pass
before the festooned girl would realize what
her hostess must have seen: her bygone self
and her dead sisters, flaunting these fine items
when they were new, and later not so new.
The First Mosquito
Still warm, still damp. Twilight.
Emboldened to impinge,
the whining parasite
administers a twinge,
a punctual siphoning
announcing summer’s prime.
Too small to call a sting,
the