The regrets who used to attend me
Stayed for many years – good natured
And gentlemanly when off duty
I’d see them strolling arm and arm
On their regular days off; we’d nod
Or exchange a few words. I never asked
What they did when not holding my heart
In red-hot tongs or making me relive
Days I wanted to forget but they have
One by one grown old or moved on
So I make do with itinerant regrets –
Enthusiastic but without manners or training;
Ask them for references and they laugh.
I am a measuring spoon but I
Have never been happy in this drawer
With the other spoons and cups
And funnels and the small kitchen scales.
Help me, twenty month old child!
Only you know how I long to hide
Behind the jars of rice or perch
Defiant on a tower of cat food.
My mother read every poem Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote
And some she didn't but my mother thought she did
And a few my mother knew she hadn't
But would have if she'd thought of them
Just back from a trip Li Po
Empties his bag of stray lines
And thoughts for poems. Near the bottom
My father's curled shadow sleeps
On some bales of loose-woven moonlight.
Astley's Spanish Horse lived
Forty-two years. It knew how
To set plates and cups on a table,
Bring a boiling kettle from the fire
And make tea. It could also
Unsaddle itself, wink at pretty girls,
Perform small bits of magic
And wash its feet in a bucket.
In toothless old age it lived on bread;
When it died, Astley had its hide
Made into a drum.
The shadows had been sent to forage so when
They returned at dusk there is no one
To greet them. They consider the evidence:
A torn newspaper; a broken violin;
A tight-corked bottle, a slosh of light trapped inside.
Cats emerge; the shadows feed them
And then draw lots to determine
Who must start pretending to be people
I wake up early because many years ago
An orange cat would bite my elbows
Wanting to be fed. Once dressed,
I open the shade so a tortoiseshell ghost
Can read the future in the scutterings
Of birds and squirrels. At breakfast,
A black and white ghost reminds me
To never leave a milk pitcher unattended.
I've known a cat who could levitate and one
Who walked on her hind legs, startling my mother.
One cat spent her whole life trying to be
In any room where I wasn't. Another
Followed me everywhere.
I was walking downtown and noticed God
Was leaning against a building looking serious;
There was a patch on His jacket – not the decoration sort
But the “there's a hole I mean to cover” sort.
I asked what He was up to and He said
“Remembering all the people who’d died today;
There were an awful lot of them, though.”
I asked if I could help and He said sure
And scootched over to make room for me;
We leaned on the wall together, thinking dead folk.
It was hard work at first but got easier and faster
At last I said “God, I’m pretty sure I’ve remembered,
Some dead folk who never were alive.” He said it was okay;
We were too far along to turn back and He would mark
Anyone I’d invented by teaching them a secret handshake
So they could recognize each other and be able
To get extra servings of mush in Heaven.
(I was surprised to find out there’d be mush in Heaven
God said what sort of Heaven wouldn’t serve mush?)
