Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Waxing and Waning

I was in wax

And the whole world was in jelly

My hands, my nails

Were crabs, were snails.

I feared the blue wall in the hill

and when the sky was bruised

When my hands felt cold and dead

I wanted to lay them down to bed

But I was in wax

And the whole world was in jelly.

I feared rooms with radiators and wicker

you were too afraid of unhappiness.

Your hands, your hair,

were always everywhere.

While flowers were fat and blooming in the snow,
peaches were rotting in the kitchen bowl.

Thin Pipes

 Love slithered across the newly uncarpeted floor that night and met me in my empty room. "Will you find the empty clam shells here too?" it asked. "You're disgusting," I sneered and felt that I was doing what I only did when I fell asleep angry. Love slithered into my new closet and choked itself around the bar that would soon hang all of my dresses. "Stop." Love released its grip and dropped to the floor in a way that only something with no arms or legs could. I nailed the closet shut and moved out before I could move in.

            You smell like sleep and tears.

 The deeply Catholic Wolfgang Amadeus pried and prodded and I wept and could feel the source of warmth weeping too. He asked if I wanted clams for breakfast. We had clams for breakfast. When I tasted the bread it was bitter. When I tasted the clams they were bitter. When I tasted my tears I thought they might taste sweet like lemonade. They too were bitter.

Damn it Ann, don't look at me that way! You don't want my help? Just do what you're supposed to do.

Josephine, patroness of roses, convinced me that unpeeling oranges shouldn't make me feel dusted, convinced me that walking in lots shouldn't soak me in tar. I followed her and Green like the wind and grabbed their hooks so that I would not have to bother walking. My time with Josephine was always marred by the nights when I would fall asleep beneath the porch, I was a cat then, and she would find me and whisper to me: "Mon amour, je t'arrache. Je t'arrache," and I would whisper back "Tear at me so that I spill beads from my lobes. Tear at me so that I drop any plates I am holding." In the morning we dressed in damp silence.

I would always wake up in tar.

One evening at dinner you fell asleep with your face in your food. I ripped a petal from the centerpiece and tiptoed out of the house through the kitchen. You never saw me again. I moved into the apartment across the street and watched you eat dinner alone. I cried. I cried. I cried. I closed the curtains. I stopped crying. I opened the curtains. I carved wax tulips in your eyes and found out you weren't lonely, you were just old which is still lonely but not in a way I could understand. I looked at your face and felt comforted by it. I felt cradled by the space above your lip and beneath your nose. I imagined myself sliding back and forth in it like I were in a rowboat and waves were lapping at the side of it, licking it with its receding peaks.

The river is flowing, flowing and growing. The river is flowing, down to the sea. River carry me, a child I will always be. River, carry me down to the sea.

The Moon Versus Us Ever Sleeping Together Again

by Richard Brautigan

I sit here, an arch-villain of romance,
thinking about you. Gee, I’m sorry
I made you unhappy, but there was nothing
I could do about it because I have to be free.
Perhaps everything would have been different
if you had stayed at the table or asked me
to go out with you to look at the moon,
instead of getting up and leaving me alone with
her.

Things

Will, will you deflower the flowered hour and lay time out around the tundra?

A harrowing halo persists and purses your coded conscience but

Curdled cream and a strangled mangle eat at the angles of marigolds

Strange is strange but proclaiming Argentine orange was stranger

Shoveling always what is already hollow

Lumps and mumps howl and scowl at the sea foam catacomb

Knowing neither Neive nor Nora nor a single Orson sporing flora

Waves

 pictures from: La Tristesse Durera Toujours

In a Cafe

by Richard Brautigan

I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.