Safe House

Upside down in a whelk a hermit

crab opens & closes

a mouth — an autonomic clench —

& when the legs rotate

the shell to face down into sand

shrimps & worms & fleas

— beach tinies — are sluiced inside

that mouth & juiced until

the hermit crab balloons & oozes

out of its safe house

to search for a next & bigger space.

Clean

As simply as a self-effacing bar of soap
e.g., Ivory, two weeks later

it's half its original size. I use it daily

& because the stall has no soap dish

up & out of the stream, the shower

pours down on the bar in its corner —

effaces it even faster than my washing does.

Ivory was childhood soap, pure

or not pure, what does pure mean

when it comes to soap? Or to people?

Pure at heart. Purer than driven snow.

(The concept of virgin flits on & off

the screen.) Pure genius. Pure & simple.

Ninety-nine & forty-four one hundredths

pure probably meant something to my mother

who put her faith in clean. Scrub as I would

I never met her standards — impure

thoughts & words. She washed out my mouth

with Ivory soap time & time again

to no avail — a hippie meant to be. In what

dimension did she believe herself pure?

Raised Catholic, by eighteen lapsed

& at war with her bricklayer father,

how does she come to consider herself pure?

Trains as a nurse, meets & marries my father,

never knows another man, even

the doctor who lusts for her, she tells me

that & no more, conceals the rest

(all the while deploring my behavior —

why did she even tell me that much?)

& lives & dies before anyone can find out.

I'll Dream You

I see you standing in the doorway

I see you sitting at the keys

I once gave you a Dell laptop

I believe it was red

I see you choosing a chocolate

I see you brewing unsweet tea

I see you gathering your belongings

after a workshop you taught

I help you carry boxes & cloth bags

I see you driving down 61 toward Charleston

I see you talking to Tova

that you met Tova

that she remembers you

I see you in a yellow cotton shirt

I see you draped in a long scarf

like a chasuble

you were not that kind of religious

I hear you saying thank you to your audience for coming out

I see you writing to a prompt

you didn’t like that much

your prompts came undirected

I see pages in your journal in your hand

I never read one

your journals like Emily’s poems

unread, undetected

gone to an archive

I hope they remain unread

most of the time I don’t see or hear or think of you

except every time I say Susan

or hear a bird

what is that one, Susan? I say

I see us at the table — you, me, Blue —

eating Blue’s bog chicken

tasting field peas

I see the kitchen after his cooking

I see the photo of young Susan & young Blue

how we set out, some of us

together until we fall apart

I see you in your own mind’s eye

your hand covering the page

with what tilts & topples

& turns into magic

this is true

one of these days, I’ll dream you

Seventy years laterit’s become impossibleto buy dinner plates

after the gold-rimmed white

place settings abandoned

along with the first marriage,

blue-rimmed & polka-dotted

Scandinavian plates equally

distributed at the end of a long

partnership, brown stoneware

the next husband brought & I

discarded, replaced with cheap

white diner-ware, replaced with

one-off primary colors, replaced

after he finally left with random

thrift-shop-ware — what to do

this time? Polish? Antique?

Botanical? Ornithological?

I’m waiting for an accident

to happen — for dishes to fall

into my lap, all of them cracked,

chipped, beforehand broken.

Our Susan

She will not grow old, our Susan,

grow feeble, grow dim, or crumble

as do eggshells or bread, nor fox

like pages in a timeworn book.

She fell the entire distance from

on her game to out of the game

forever. Doesn’t know our pain.

Left us to carry the flame, pick

through the pieces. Outdoors the wren’s

gone quiet, the blue gray. It’s set

to rain. Nothing better than rain

to ease the ache, set words to page.

Sing of love, sing of all the times

we sang together — musicked, rhymed.

Iron Swamp Trail

Two miles Helen & I hike

this morning — Iron Swamp Trail

in Awendaw, wild space saved

by national forestry, thanks to the likes of

Theodore Roosevelt. The mosquitoes

nearly kill us. Non-Deet repellant

lasts for about five minutes, its scent

no deterrent. Dike-building negroes

toiling in pluff mud must have been eaten

alive by insects, sun, & alligators,

every day urged to work harder

by overseers, another variety of peon.

Voices of birds surround us — unnamed

because we don’t have that skill.

Downstream a turkey vulture, the kill

it feeds on dead, forgotten, reclaimed.