RELATIVES

If the nine of them were a baseball team

Aunt Sadie would be the wily pitcher

Shaking off the signs her mother gives

From the dugout. Her speedball, true, is

Nothing special, but her screwballs

And her deceptive curves break

At the last moment, gleefully arcing

Just within the strike zone’s corners

So the ball slams time after time

Into Aunt Doris’s glove. Sadie’s so good

The outfielders are bored. Uncle Joe

Seems asleep in right field; my father, in left,

Is carefully imagining a game to be played

Fifty years hence, unless it rains.

NOT ABOUT MY AUNTS

NOT ABOUT MY AUNTS

I have been advised to write poems

About people I know, or,

Failing that, about myself.

Perhaps one on my aunts? I have many

And, mysteriously, new ones

Appear sometimes, old women

I’ve never met who still

Have known me all my life.

So, the next poem that came by

I looked at sharply, trying to see

If it might be about an aunt –

Aunt Sadie, if choice were mine

Who is short and sharp and witty

And walks gamely on crippled legs.

But the poem had a cold, mad eye

And was plainly about the Emperor Wang;

He and Sadie would never live well together

Nor Anne, nor Doris, nor Mabel,

And certainly not Rose or Jenny or the one

Who died young and her name with her.

(As for my Aunt Tamara – she

Is a Russian novel).