Welcome

October Morning

To Ira

We are two spoons, cat against my back.

You are old; so am I. Something will happen.

Maples redden in the white window frame.

On the clock radio, numbers flip and flip.

You are old; so am I. Something will happen.

Cancer or heart? Diabetes or Armageddon?

On the clock radio, numbers flip and flip. 

Car crash or stroke? Alzheimer’s or gunshot?

Cancer or heart? Diabetes or Armageddon? 

Beloved walls shelter us, shimmer in the half-light.

Car crash or stroke? Alzheimer’s or gunshot?

Fleece blankets unite us, together for now.

Beloved walls shelter us, shimmer in the half-light.

My hand rests lightly on your muscled shoulder. 

Fleece blankets unite us, together for now.

No doubt at all: Something will happen. 

My hand rests lightly on your muscled shoulder.

Maples redden in the white window frame.

No doubt at all: Something will happen. 

We are two spoons, cat against my back. 

What’s Wrong with Me? 

In the nineteen eighties, after we put our kids in daycare and went back to school and divorced our bully husbands and got jobs working for bully bosses and dated men who all turned out to be bullies or bores or both, and we read the article that said the chances of a woman our age meeting a man to marry were worse than the chances of being a hijack victim on a plane, we went into therapy to try to figure out what was wrong with us. 

The therapists, to whom we paid large portions of our meager salaries, listened to our sad stories and asked us what we wanted and told us about healthy boundaries and summoned memories of traumas inflicted by our bully parents and made us write in workbooks and talk to chairs and pound pillows and sent us off to survivor groups and assertiveness training and weight-lifting and self-defense and Twelve Step programs and community college classes in finance and auto repairs, all of which led to our going back to school again and becoming therapists ourselves, and some of us even managed, notwithstanding the dismal odds, to find, at last, good partners who were neither bullies nor bores, but whom we ourselves tended to bully until we got to Step Nine in our Twelve Step groups, which required us, after surrendering to our Higher Powers, to make amends and live serenely ever after, which was all we’d really wanted in the first place. 

Gilead

Years later, sleepless

in an outlandish world, 

she found comfort in memories

not of victory or applause,

nor even of romance, 

but of a forest green swing set,

metal seats on twistable chains, 

an A-shape at each end.

Of clotheslines stretched between 

massive oaks, and a lawnmower

that made a whirring sound. 

Of a screened back porch,

breeze-catching, eavesdropping,

where, summer evenings, her father 

followed White Sox games 

on a foggy transistor. 

Of her mother’s red roses nourished by

black dirt teeming with night-crawlers.

Of Betty and Leighton, big brother David, 

and herself eating corn-fed steaks 

on the porch of their green ranch house 

on Pleasant Drive in Des Moines. 

Comfort, too, in memories 

of that house with two staircases 

in an older part of town where

Grandma Harter, ankles swollen

over black old-lady shoes,

sat knitting in her solarium armchair

her ample form encased in flowered print 

for a DAR meeting. 

Of Grandma’s stories about 

Great Grandmother Ives and Great Aunt Nettie, 

how they circled the world in the 1920s 

and drove a hard bargain 

with a merchant in India for a tiger skin

and left their daughters a trunk 

filled with beaded dresses.

Of her mother’s rack of silver spoons 

from eight generations of mothers, 

of the flowered teacups in her China cabinet

and the tiny pink plate from a Vermont ancestor

on Grandpa Harter’s side, first president 

of Harvard College. 

Of the photo album on their coffee table,

with its green leather cover and pictures

of Sally, the older sister who died in infancy,

and David eating watermelon

and herself as a naked baby. 

Of her brother’s colored slide shows

after their trips to California and Florida

in their two-toned Oldsmobile 88. 

Balm for these rabid times,

she thought, a heart-soothing balm,

as she folded memories over her

like a warm blanket, and fell back 

into a swirl of images.