Helping My Daughter Move into
Her First Apartment

This is all I am to her now:  
a pair of legs in running shoes, 


two arms strung with braided wire.  
She heaves a carton sagging with CDs 


at me and I accept it gladly, lifting 
with my legs, not bending over, 


raising each foot high enough 
to clear the step.  Fortunate to be 


of any use to her at all,
I wrestle, stooped and single-handed,


with her mattress in the stairwell,
saying nothing as it pins me, 


sweating, to the wall.  Vacuum cleaner, 
spiny cactus, five-pound sacks 


of rice and lentils slumped 
against my heart: up one flight 


of stairs and then another, 
down again with nothing in my arms.

No Children, No Pets

I  bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s
in a running-shoe box held shut
with elastic bands.  Then I clean
the corners where she has eaten and
slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food 
from the baseboard, dumping the litter 
and blasting the pan with a hose.  The plastic 
dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-
soaked towel I put in the trash.  I put 
the catnip mouse in the box and I put 
the box away, too, in a deep 
dirt drawer in the earth.


When the death-energy leaves me,
I go to the room where my daughter slept
in nursery school, grammar school, high school, 
I lie on her milky bedspread and think 
of the day I left her at college, how nothing
could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax
out from between her floorboards,
or taking a razor blade to the decal
that said to the firemen, Break
this window first.  I close my eyes now 
and enter a place that’s clearly 
expecting me, swaddled in loss 
and then losing that, too, as I move 
from room to bone-white room
in the house of the rest of my life.

credit:  poems from The Golden Hour, (Autumn House Press, 2006)

© Copyright, 2006, Sue Ellen Thompson.
All rights reserved.