Dirt
My hen Kiev has it in for dirt.
She craters the backyard with soft pumice pits,
digging an acre of ashy basins;
she scatters mulch
with backward-scratching feet,
scraping bare the trunks of crotons and ginger plants;
she slurps night-crawlers from the ground
and severs roots, but not the detested
greenbriar and potato vine—
those she leaves growing from the grey hollows
like a last cackle;
she conspires with the raccoons
to broadcast compost,
spreading clumps, unintegrated, across the grass:
coffee grounds and fetid beans,
newspaper strips and onion skins,
blue lemons and pulpy litter
all resurface in places laid out for clean feet;
she polarizes debris that’s meant to meld together into rich loam
(brown-bag bits now crinkle stiffly between my flower beds,
while lonely cabbage cores dry in fence corners).
I’m thinking of buying a battalion of worms
to blend sand and trash
and return humus to my post-apocalyptic garden
but what would be the point? Kiev would just eat them.
Metal and Drab
I had my fill of metal and drab,
at a desk in a room, in a suite, in a concrete block,
with florescent lights and plastic blinds drawn
against the tropical brightness.
I trudged the concrete stairs to the second floor
each day, I heaved open a heavy door
underlined with stubs and cigarette ash,
closed my eyes and called upon torrent,
frond, and passion-fruit vine
“deliver me from this job,”
before stepping over the threshold
into the grey corridor,
into a box in the calendar.
I stacked the data in drop-down squares,
each name on a line, in a crease, in a sliding drawer;
my mind arranged its own inventory
(“gob-smacked,” “saffron,” “tiramisu”)
to crowd out the ordinal meanness.
After work, outside beside the fragrant gardenias,
I rewrote the day,
the way I keep reworking this poem
to include all that was absent and filed-away:
body, beauty, nuance, compassion,
the way sometimes in the sickening gleam
I tore the thick pith of a backyard citrus
and inhaled the bitter smell of the sun.
Crossroad
At a crossroad on a quiet day
she does a double-take through rolled-up glass,
a startled glance and slight pull-back
that only I notice;
the older man in the blue sedan
doesn’t see more than the dull crawl
of her nondescript car as it passes through the shadows
of the laurel oaks,
but I take in her black hair, pulled back and morning-tidy,
the mouth curved confusedly on her taupe face,
the dough of impending middle age
softening her forearms into ovals,
the whole effect so regular it begs a story:
Why has she looked twice at this guy?
Is it the polished olive-brown of his cheeks,
the breeziness of his t-shirt,
the careful hold of one hand on the wheel?
Does he evoke a patriarch making a toast
at a long table by a cliff by the sparkling sea,
with bowls of tomatoes and penne and ciabatta
and even the children with wine glasses half-filled?
Does the sight of him make the clinging heat
feel like a dry mediterranean afternoon
sweetened with tipsiness and garlic?
Or maybe I watch too many Italian films;
maybe he’s really her next-door neighbor
who just came from the barber with his beard newly shaved
and she almost didn’t recognize him;
maybe the reason I think I sense a quick spark of desire
piercing her window and then his
and then her subtle fluster and regrouping
is because I myself have now stopped running
and stand at the crossroad, eyes fixed
on the white hair and glossy, sunny skin
as he drives away.
