For Sally Landry
Laundry the sign dins
by her front window,
as though the downstairs proprietor
eyed her at work
laundering a newt’s bright web
with black stipples
to draw a fluxy view
of Diemictylus viridescens.
$500. For a Boston editor.
Upstairs: black washers,
rubbery as the eggs of a salamander,
sit unused in a box
while the faucet drips.
Mike sleeps; his drafting table
heaves with clutter—
books to design, new jazz albums, a cap.…
In the kitchen,
bananas hang bruiseless
on a string, sweetening
at the window sill.
Frameshop bills cling
to the refrigerator door
by an old swimming schedule
and a calendar cued
to outside events.
Her mother’s recipe
for homemade prune bread
scents the counter
with the loaf it guarantees.
in a south window.
Fishes, fin-perfect
in modeling clay, double
as ad hoc paperweights.
Pillageable books on everything.
Tea leaves, bay leaves.
Color charts of herbs,
sand dunes and wild flowers.
A stretch of purple columbine
drying in a noose.
Underfoot: sounds of argument
jar late into the night—
slamming, squalling, rhythmic dares.
An antique dealer
squeaks old wood
across the sidewalk,
puts out a bookcase,
like a tomcat, for the night,
curbs an unsellable chest
and three chairs:
alms for the thieves.
Bus stop and church chime
on the quarter hour.
Atoms of ink, points of dark,
her dots rim the fallow
pastures in a shape
to draw earwig, lousewort,
bottled gentian, porpoise,
australopithecine man,
then swap figure for ground:
not frog chassis now
but all the space frog-atoms
don’t ignite, as if the frogs
were there just to hail
the universe of things not-frog.
Sally runs a barrette
through her loose auburn hair,
fixes a blue, all-day
flame under the coffee
dripping through a filter
delicate as flesh,
watches a drop fall
into the quickening swill
black as the magic
of a million stipples,
preens her pen shaft
with thin, deft fingers,
then chooses
the day’s perfect nib.