1990. In 1991,
I pick up the calendar she kept
by her reading chair. Her neat script fills the square of
January 22:
Carl died. Life is over.
The woman in green jacket and green skirt, full throttle,
smiles toward the camera
as she rounds the corner of the terminal,
purse under one arm and blue carry-on under the other.
Because this photograph is not mine to keep, I take
a photograph of it.
Barthes says I am now operator
and referent,
sliver of thumb and palm visibly cradling Kodak print.
The rest of January 1991 stays blank.
February, blank. March, bare.
But then a church meeting is scheduled.
She pencils in a lunch.
Yes, she will come to the recital.
Her cursive wakens the days.
Even in winter, the garden can call itself to bloom.
CARD TABLE
A practical gift for moving to the city:
good cherry squared around black vinyl,
four long legs that fold within itself
as a greyhound does, disappearing into a nap.
Just big enough for a bridge match
if I’d ever had four people willing to kiss knees.
Just big enough to let me call a corner
of that S Street studio my breakfast nook,
stacked with a week’s worth of newspapers
while I ate cereal cross-legged on my futon.
Just big enough to pull out every few years
and complain how small the table was,
too crowded as a desk, too low for my chairs.
In January, we stared at the strange space
wedged between two kitchen doorways.
Might as well try the card table.
We stacked onions there, then potatoes,
then tomatoes and peaches, and it became
the chopping table; stirring table; serving table.
Now, the first morning she is gone,
I see a swipe in the vinyl where a hot dish
burned through, and realize I forgot
to ask for anything—a ring, her sheet music—
so what I have is this reminder
that she, too, was once a girl in a city,
and that she knew I’d always need a table.
IN PRAISE OF PINTOS
Phaseolus vulgaris.
Forgive these mottled punks,
children burst
from the piñata of the New World,
and their ridiculous names
of Lariat, Kodiak, Othello,
Burke, Sierra, Maverick.
Forgive these rapscallions that
would fill the hot tub with ham
while their parents
go away for the weekend,
just to soak in that salt.
Forgive their climbing instinct.
Forgive their ignorance
of their grandparents who
ennobled Rome’s greatest:
Fabius, Lentulus, Pisa, Cicero
the chickpea. Legume
is the enclosure, fruit in pod,
but pulse is the seed.
From the Latin, puls
is to beat, to mash, to throb.
Forgive that thirst. Forgive
that gallop. Beans are the promise
of outlasting the coldest season.
They are a wink in the palm of God.
THE VOW
But never for us the flitch of bacon though,
That some may win in Essex at Dunmow.
So promises the old wives’ tale,
a covenant according to Chaucer:
that if tomorrow I trek to Dunmow Church
and swear before God and congregation
not a fight, no single quarrel,
in 366 days not even once wishing
to be un-married to you,
that hog is ours for the taking.
My love, what
limp victory that would be,
sweet silence of perfect agreement
as we swing a pork trophy between us,
walking the many miles home—
the fatback won, the battle lost.
I reserve my right to a good spat,
to the meat’s spit in flame.
I take joy in choosing you again and again.
LITTLE LOVE POEM
The 6 a.m. sun considers everything,
humming its way past the Capitol.
I reheat yesterday’s coffee,
put lima beans into a pot:
Fordhook, always Fordhook,
drizzle of olive oil, pinch of salt, shake
of chili flakes. The chicken broth
comes to boil for a minute
before I cover, simmer. Soon he’ll wake,
and I’ll ask him to put a record on,
something with no words;
bowls, spoons, a single twist of pepper.
DEATH BY CHOCOLATE
A man wants my take on his novel
where a wife dies with a peanut in her mouth
after we’ve met her husband, in the act with his secretary
in the passenger seat of a late-life convertible.
A man wants my take on his novel
where the husband’s marital issues are solved
by her anaphylactic collapse after he serves her takeout
spiked with a cashew, and for another 300 pages
he wonders, Was it an accident? Or did I
know? Somewhere out there a man
is writing a novel about a chef with a taste
for adding shrimp paste to curry and his unsuspecting
shellfish-allergic wife, and I will be asked
for my take on it. I have been offered dozens of takes
on my own death. Suggestions abound.
Death by ice cream. Death by cake. Death by cucumber,
though that would take a while;
perhaps gazpacho as a shortcut. Death by mango.
Death by Spanish omelette. Death by dairy,
an abstraction sexy to someone who has never side-eyed
cream brought out slopping toward the coffee;
who has never felt histamine’s palm at her throat,
who says Cheese makes life worth living.
These wives! I get you, women who
did not grow up aspiring to be a plot device.
We almost die a lot. Or: we die a lot,
almost. We’re over it. Our mouths have more to say.
AN ACCOMMODATION
Pistachio’s buds of salt-funk;
cayenne macramé of boiled crawfish;
cantaloupe’s tacky, thin sugar;
the first time I eat a thing
I can eat anything.
The allergy requires initial exposure
before my mast cells gather,
before my body says No.
Let’s consider your need to center me
on the table, to call my portion
naked or plain while offering
others the “real” version.
Let’s examine your suggestion
we put warnings on the cabinets,
attach my name to a list.
First time, I tasted
a kind of kindness. Then
came my second reckoning.
INTERSECTIONALITY
In the diagram, Bob
is a striped blue triangle.
Some people do not like Bob.
Down with stripes.
Down with triangles.
Bob is at the intersection of
stripey-ness and blue-ness,
of triangle-ness and Bob-ness.
Luckily, there are “liberation groups.”
Here is where the model
starts to fail me: maybe liberation
has come in the form of four taxis,
each waiting to carry Bob away
from this intersection.
Bob should not have to choose
any one taxi, I am told.
Or maybe Bob does not
want to go? Bob has noticed
the quality of the bodega’s coffee.
Bob likes this intersection.
Bob can get a pretty good deal
on buying a one-bedroom.
Bob is a striped blue triangle.
Bob is a damn gentrifier.
In 1995, I flunked
