aayoung
so he took her like an animal
but my father’s ghost wept
so she went to the men
like a good American
good people don’t want to believe
in visionaries good or bad
especially when you have red clay mud
starved stabbed scabbed over and over
on your grandmother’s dress from being raped just like her
from ft. Sumter to Wounded Knee
he’d never seen that color red come out of a living fertility statue
my veil is torn
the dog is dead
the natives have resumed their drumbeat
I’ve done my share. Coast to coast.
I’ve done my share of poet husbands, too.
a woman’s life
is too tenuous
delicate
billowy
spider web
close call on I-75
in preterm labor
on the way to the
Paris airport
in the rain
fragile
beautiful
precious
sacrosanct
finite
for bad friends
bad family
bad coffee
bad shoes
bad mattresses
bad jobs
bad husbands
bad debt
and bad dick
learn this by 30 for maximum
enjoyment
future
female
conquerors
of a dying planet
i put on some water for tea
then decided to mop the floors
of our new little nest
before the furniture gets carried in
before the rest of our lives happen
Murphy’s Oil Soap
water and sunshine into a bucket
carried through the echoing emptiness
of what will be
over original hardwood
placed there in 1941
i love to clean
the ritual of it
i write in my thoughts as i work
images painting themselves
into spaces around my gentle humming
spreading wet across the grain
seeing hands that mopped this floor
before me
wives husbands
fathers mothers
lovers and
put-upon teenagers
oh this house
has a history
built the year
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor
it’s all still there
nailed down memories
layers of time entombed in wax
someone stood in that living room and heard
we dropped the bomb
we landed at Normandy
of a flag raised in Iwo-Jima
Kennedy was dead
Vietnam was a lost cause only good
for folded flags being handed to weeping mothers
Nixon was a crook
Reagan and John Lennon had been shot
the Berlin wall had fallen
i heard first steps
crying babies
crying widows
joyous laughter
say cheese
wine glasses clinking together
realizing with a smile
this floor is mine
the foundation of a family
and i will love it
then
the teapot
began to whistle
