To My Neighbor John, Who Is Completely Happy

That moonlit warble in the summer dark
is you, John, singing your way home
from the Rehab Center where you work
evenings— one out-of-kilter chromosome
has never slowed you down. Your nightly whoop
floods the neighborhood with so much bliss
that my Dalmatian springs from sleep
and opens up her throat to harmonize
with you— along with every other canine
in a one-mile radius. Soon the air
is vibrating for blocks with strains
of an unearthly sweetness— prayers
rising from the bottom of the brain,
an ode to joy, with tabernacle choir.

Reading the Obituaries

Now the Barbaras have begun to die,
trailing their older sisters to the grave,
the Helens, Margies, Nans—who said goodbye
just days ago, it seems, taking their leave
a step or two behind the hooded girls
who bloomed and withered with the century—
the Dorotheas, Eleanors and Pearls
now swaying on the edge of memory.
Soon, soon, the scythe will sweep for Jeanne
and Angela, Patricia and Diane—
pause, and return for Karen and Christine
while Susan spends a sleepless night again.

Ah, Debra, how can you be growing old?
Jennifer, Michelle, your hands are cold.

The Turban

You look magnificent without your hair.
You look indomitable.  You look proud
beneath the turquoise turban that you wear.

That turban doesn’t tolerate despair—
no whiffs of what you’d never say out loud,
no mourning for your fallen chestnut hair.

Instead, you’ve taken on a feisty air
that never fails to captivate the crowd—
just like that winking turban that you wear.

She’s bald!  the turban cries. But you don’t care;
it seems that you’ve entirely disavowed
all myths that claim you’re less without your hair.

We see only your radiance up there,
more eloquent than kerchief, crown, or shroud
out-glittering the turban that you wear—

which causes us to entertain a rare
surmise: something unearthly has endowed
you–and the turquoise turban that you wear—
with majesty.  With or without your hair.

Summer Sapphics

Maybe things are better than we imagine
if a rubber inner-tube still can send us
drifting down a sinuous, tree-draped river
like the Wisconsin—

far removed from spores of touristococcus.
As we bob half-in and half-out of water
with our legs like tentacles, dangling limply
under the surface

we are like invertebrate creatures, floating
on a cosmic droplet—a caravan of
giant-sized amoebas, without a clear-cut
sense of direction

It’s as if we’ve started evolving backwards:
mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon—
toward that dark primordial soup we seem so
eager to get to.

Funny, how warm water will whisper secrets
in its native language to every cell—yet
we, the aggregation, have just begun to
fathom the gestures.

For Lucy, Who Came First

She simply settled down in one piece right where
she was, in the sand of a long-vanished lake edge
or stream—and died.
            —Donald C. Johanson, paleoanthropologist

When I put my hand up to my face
I can trace her heavy jawbone and the sockets
of her eyes under my skin. And in the dark
I sometimes feel her trying to uncurl
from where she sank into mudbound sleep
on that soft and temporary shore
so staggeringly long ago, time
had not yet cut its straight line
through the tangle of the planet,
nor taken up the measured sweep
that stacks the days and seasons
into an ordered past

But I can feel her stirring
in the core of me, trying to rise up
from the deep hollow where she fell—
wanting to prowl on long callused toes
to see what made that shadow move,
to face the creature in the dark thicket
needing to know if this late-spreading dawn
will bring handfuls of berries, black
as blood, or the sting of snow,
or the steady slap of sand and weed
that wraps itself like fur
around the body.

Rondeau: Old Woman With Cat

Osteoporosis (one of life’s indignities)
is such a splendid name for the disease—
all those little o’s, holes in the bone
where the rain gets in, rendering a crone
like me defective, porous as swiss cheese.

I’m riddled at the hips and knees,
roundsided as parentheses
since my shrunken spine has known
osteoporosis—

and my extremities
have shriveled into lacy filagrees,
breakable as glass on stone.
Naked at the window ledge I drone
to my sleek, supple Siamese:
osteoporosis.

The Day After I Die

they will find the cure
for whatever got me,
and a unified theory
of physics will be announced
by a consortium
from M.I.T.

Following the funeral,
Earth will be contacted by
intelligent beings from
the Farquhar galaxy–
immediately after which,
Tesla will announce a car
that can run forever
on table scraps.

Within the week,
Abbott Labs will introduce
an age-reversing cream
on the very heels of
a morning-after diet pill
that tastes exactly
like a Cadbury’s Easter Egg.

Finally,
the woman they hire to clean
and fumigate my house
will come across a sheaf
of my old poems (tucked
optimistically inside a catalogue
from The Gap)

and turn them over to
her Thursday client, Billy Collins,
who (ignoring an infinitesimal twinge
of envy) will gallantly take charge
and see to everything,
including, of course,
any immortality.