After Hopper's The Hotel Room

A woman like a swimmer
at the edge of a pool
turns her back to the glare
looks toward a book,
heavy on her knees,
loose in her hands.
Her face so in shade
that only the angle
of her chin and the angle
of the book indicate
something besides its words
are on her mind.
She is nearly naked,
her full smooth legs
another kind of glow
against the white
anchored sheet.
A creamy pink chemise
wraps her torso
like another skin.
Why does it seem
something is going to happen
or has happened here?
Her dress lying draped
across the heavy armchair,
two pieces of luggage
standing closed and tagged,
black pumps askew
on the carpet, deep green
like the chair
and the wall to the left.
A perfect kind of balance
is at play here, the dislocation
in an order of its own.
So much has gathered
in this room where colors
have their own sense of play
and relief, next to
a wide window
noisy with light.

---

How to Get from my Mother's House to Mine

Leave when you are very young before language
entangles your urge toward light
and leave early in the morning before coffee blooms
in the kitchen with its promise of warmth.
Take the numbers in your street address
write them the early way
you understood them:
twenty, then ninety then two.
Also your phone number: Kingswood 2481
while we're talking of magic.
Let your red Schwinn bike carry you past
city houses to small flat farms and barns
where your pony will snort when she sees you
ready to trot to the cinder path that traces
the Scioto River beyond the outburst
of a dam to the grave of Chief Leatherlips
where his Wyandot name, Same Size as Blue,
was the first poem you learned.

But this is all local stuff. You'll need to go further
and a compass will help you head south
and then north in the tumult of years up ahead.
This is, after all, more than a day's journey
we are talking of here and much of it
will be undertaken at night while you sleep.
The searching for pocketbooks, children, doctors,
the loss of birds, wallets, fathers,
brothers, many of whom become stones
is serious and ceaseless work and it must be done
with precision. This is how houses are made

and mine is no different. If you've done the labor
I'm easy to find.

---

St. Mary's of the Springs

The circle my boot made in the slush-melt of snow
was a way to show Sister that I had no answer

and that fear of her hell and her God
was nothing compared to the fear of what lay

consecrated under her starched blazing wimple
pressing her cheeks into balloons of pale flesh

quivering with the question she repeated like a rosary
her hands circling, one around the other

in the heavy cuffed sleeve of her pitchy habit.
An orbit that itself was perpetual hell.

Obdurate
I learned how to be under her gaze and only now

can offer the coveted forgiveness to myself
that non Catholic girl who took something

that was not my own because
I could not live without that sugar-laden

egg, embroidered as it was with luscious
pink rosettes and shining within, a family

of tiny bunnies dancing. I didn't win
the race that would have won the egg

but gave myself permission to take it nonetheless.
It was, despite the weather, Easter

and I had planned, in my unstingable soul
to carry it home to my mother.

---

Aftermath

At age eleven my numbers froze
and refused arrangement

as in the addsubtractmultiplydivide
fifth grade workbook and my dry

tongue caught flame that swept
away memory from the roof of my mouth.

It was spring; I didn't care.
I stopped doing math and rode my horse.

She was frisky after winter, wanted to gallop.
I let her, to her heart's content, until her sweat

sprayed like suds into my eyes and it was over.
My father had carried a suit from the guest

closet into his bedroom and put it on.
The fabric was dense,

the buttons cold against my cheek.
Out the screen door the cigarette he flipped

made a high-flying arc into the shrub.
He went off to the Navy like he was going to work

at his office. My mother, distracted
sat on my bed every night doing times tables

with me. Her hands were full
with an ashtray, a cigarette, my math book.

She passed along numbers like stones.
I took them, placed then where they belonged.

We built a wall of the things I couldn't forget.
It was the hardest job Mother and I ever had.