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Fish
Fork
I
am the fish fork: less than necessary. Useful, in my way, for the
tableside filet
but outmoded, quaint--most people don't know
what to do with me.
I am overlooked (or, worse, examined
curiously over charger plate and linens,
and dismissed--with
raised brow and scoffing--while water trembles in cut
crystal;
soup spoons blush; someone demands, “What's
this thing for? What's this?”
as the salad cringes,
baleful, under its veil of vinaigrette).
I want to say:
Just leave me be, here, in the box with the blue-flocked
lining,
in the slot made to order, the only place I fit.
Amid
the sociable silverplate, I retreat beneath the napkin; I am
seldom
used. But sometimes, my tines gleam in candlelight, a
latent sharpness
tipped toward flesh:
sometimes, I feel
like a knife.
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Nocturne
Every
year in midwinter, owls.
Sometimes the saw-whet. Sometimes the
little-eared.
Not night music, but unmistakable.
Many
times I am alone.
It seems you are so seldom in our bed.
City
takes you: no night music,
Only the siren, traffic, hum
Of
a hundred thousand generators.
Only the great horns of the
city take you.
Squalling. You ignore them, sleep.
But I
lie sleepless. Screech owl yearns.
Every year in midwinter,
only the great-horned.
Owls. Wind-squall. I am alone.
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Small
Change
After her husband died,
she kept
finding coins
in the pockets of his worn pants,
at
the bottom of
the clothes-hamper, little caches
of
quarters in the car
or on a corner of his dresser,
rolled
nickels in a drawer,
loose pennies
under sofa cushions,
jars
of mixed change
on his workshop shelves.
In
every room of her house,
something left behind.
She sits
alone at the kitchen counter
adding the currency
of her
thirty married years:
one gold ring, a heap of coins.
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