Marilyn Annucci
Claw FootedI run my hands over
the smooth white porcelain: You might have been a fountain full of silver coins You might have been Apollo in the Galleria Borghese It has no face, yet it faces me. I bend my ear to its sturdy shell, listen. Don’t think it doesn’t dream of leaving its claw feet tense and awkward. But where would it go? Among FernsThe ferns
which were once green and airy-- friendly hands waving waving to the sky to the trees to me-- are now bowing goodbye. They are browning bleaching. They look like tiny Christmas trees. Fingers stripped of leaves. They look like fish skeletons. Not one of them groans If I only had it to live over. They did what they could-- jabbed their fists through the tough dirt, opened their amazed palms to the sun. And now they are sagging, now they are falling-- no applause. Mid-Life LookoutThin as a sock puppet
my neck rises to offer you my head Hello out there. Sometimes my friend eyes the skeleton that lives inside me, “Eat!” Still, my neck stays lean--swallowing, swallowing. It grows old ahead of me. It holds the talking head of me. Pivots east, west, north, south-- a lighthouse on a black night: mercy mercy the shaggy white doglies on the rug
four paws facing north size of a gym bag everything he needs inside |
Arachnida NeuroticaThen there’s that spider
indoors in a corner of porcelain near the tub acting like there’s no such thing as summer, suspended in a web of little buggers small as Oreo crumbs. All eight legs cringe when I raise my plastic cup his way, planning to carry him outdoors to where it’s really happening. But no go. The Grave's a fine and private place. Same with the one in the wooden corner near the broken stereo. She spreads her limbs like a goalie. Where are the scientists when you need them? Arachnida neurotica, spinning silk for safety, months before winter’s cold. Sometimes I carry one out, tough love, make the critter live a full spider’s life in a patch of green leaves by a fence. Other times I let them spin and spin, whisper Rumpelstiltskin in their invisible ears. Itis like taking a small mule
into the shower for fun, maybe to condition its coarse hair, then seeing the mud on its hooves and knowing you’re in for it when your mother gets home. And pretty soon you’re wondering, what’s like taking a small mule into the shower? and what are you in or out for when Mother comes home? And your hands are deep in the animal’s craggy sides and the floor is wet and there’s an apartment below yours, and your neighbor scares you the way she scowls when you walk downstairs as if you had hooves and then you realize you don’t know what mules eat or where you could even ride one, and this little guy’s starting to kick, hitting the porcelain tub like a jar of your father’s shaving cream against the sink only twenty times louder than your father, who would never permit a moose or a mouse or a mule in the tub, not even as a simile. Tea BallTiny cage of air
it swings on a silver chain It could hypnotize kings The planet in the palm of my hand. Wheat from chaff, salt from dirt. Do not underestimate-- those who unclasp these twin worlds, who enter these holy boats, come back changed. |