After the wars were over, the ones people sang about,
things quit sticking. My grandparents, for instance,
shook the dirt from their shoes and moved to town,
drove the paved streets of Columbia, spurned
orange juice for astronaut Tang.
And what year exactly did I start shaking off hugs?
For a wedding gift, I got Teflon pans.
Teflon, if you’d like to know, is a long-chain polymer,
a fluorocarbon plastic, like Freon.
As good as gold and platinum at resisting things.
Eggs slide right off, as on TV.
Not to mention what came after, Reagan and Bush,
facts sliding across the screen, disappearing
out of memory.
Not to mention the literary canon: Pope, Richardson,
Dryden, Spenser. Who reads them now?
The private name he used to call me, what was it?
The last time, he came through snow, bringing
a bottle of Mateus, and we made love
on the floor, not looking at each other,
nothing left but flesh and bones.
It was 1973, still no news of the danger of Freon.
All summer, I kept the air conditioner on.
The kids opened and closed doors, hot and cold,
the holes in their hearts forming already.
Surely my own mother must have held me, early on,
before I recognized her broken heart and turned away.
Surely her own mother must have held her,
sometimes, in spite of garden-smudged hands,
just to hold her.