USA

bbates+@pitt.edu

My Sister Weeds My Garden

Why should we punish ourselves with scorn
as if to have a large ass were worse than
being greedy or mean?--Marge Piercy

Pale as honeysuckle from the surgeon's saw, I watch
while she culls my garden for cocklebur, thistle and ragweed,
cropping the hollyhocks for seed, crumbling redmums across the soil.

Oaky firm, she's planted herself, feet rooted to her shoes,
daring the hill to send her slipping
on chickweed meshed between the rowdy phlox.

A colossus in my tiny garden, her arms are mills
sending a torrent of weeds to the four corners.
Her haunches move as pistons on a body she hates.

She wants to be snipped into thin blades
with the hard edges of shears she grips,
whittled into a small peg to hold a man's coat.

Anything but a plug of hips or knees like  trees,
she says before the mirror when we are dressing.
A Helen launching a thousand arrested stares

of men whose bored faces shift from cording wood,
she heeds the call of my simple garden, so entrenched in duty
that only Paris could steal her from her chore.

 Stalled

The salesman doesn't understand why
I won't buy the car.  He thinks it's money,
knocks another hundred off the sticker.
He does'nt know I'm  living in a body
with a rusted frame.  The car's in on the deal,
too, lurking  like a felon in the lot, waiting
to steal my chance at happiness, flag my last lap
around the track after I sign the papers.  Just
as  I drive down the road, my mind might skid
on black ice.  In this nightmare I'm handcuffed
to a body that squeals on me, spilling my story
to a bad cop about the grenade going off in my eye.
Or maybe in summer, in the hammock
of the afternoon, termites settle in the eaves
of my chest, and I become a house collapsing
onto itself, my skull opening to the sky like a roof
lifting off.  The salesman wears a felt stetson,
a leather jacket, a big sky of blue eyes,
but I won't let him rope me into signing.  He talks
of warranties and life insurance but does'nt
understand, there are no guarantees when you're
always listening for the whap, whap, whap
of flattened dreams.

--a "Special Merit" poem in the 
2003 Constock Review Poetry Contest

Raspberries

My friend hands me a gift bag, smiling.
I reach down to the sagging brown bottom,
damp against my palm, feel the dead weight
of red pulp, and know--they're raspberries.

I fondle them softly at first, feel them there
in the red-stained bag, softer than baby's toes.
I catch the lip of red cups, tip one over against
the next, roll them in my fingers. Red berries,
ready to burst into pools of juice, spill their wave
of pulp against the sides of my tongue.

I pour them in my hand, imagine them
in warm cream perched in crystal cups, and know
I cannot wait. I want to rip the helpless red caps
resting on each other, dig deep into the bag, bloody them,
tear them with my tongue, empty their sacks,
feel the tart curl of my animal tongue,
the grit of red seeds raking my mouth.

 Scarabs

My son calls me on his cell phone, asks
how I'm doing, a two-minute visit from afar,
our lives, now, more distant than miles.
I'm washing curtains, I say, recalling days
when he'd take them down
and I'd warm them in the dryer's womb,
hang them outside to billow in the wind.

I tell him about the bug snuggled in a pleat,
perfectly entombed, like Pompeani muffled in ash,
its insect arms extended, antennae erect.
Such idle prattle to a son busy behind a desk,
the empty click of computer keys in the background,
his voice intoning uh huh, after every detail.

I want to ease the bug out of the curtain,
but its limbs fracture, dust spilling in the open air.
I wish I could remain unbroken as I grow old
and ask my son, do you remember
days when I could leap over rocks
instead of stumbling over stones?

Perhaps he'll one day free me
from the bedrot of old age,
lift me from this sarcophagus of a body,
his hands sure as on that day
we found a dazed mole in the yard,
which he wakened with a sweep of his thumb,
unearthing it from sleep.

© All Copyright, Marilyn Bates.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.