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Bloodroot ISBN: 0-7734-3452-6 $14.95 Order from: Mellen Poetry Press, Order Department PO Box 450 Lewiston, NY 14092-0450 To order by phone, call (716) 754-2788 Journals: Request free review copy May also be ordered through: Baker & Tayor 2709 Water Ridge Parkway Charlotte, NC 28217

Upstairs at Caldwell and Graham's

Upstairs at Caldwell and Graham's, the worn wood floors
sloped, potholed in spots, pushed up in others.
Looking down from the top of the stairs onto heads of clerks
bobbing beside display cases, I was an angel on my own expectant cloud,

waiting for my mother to shop for remnants, a pattern for each
time I grew, to be used over and over, shirt after shirt, the same,
but a different color, each dress a reincarnation of the one before.
Rows of slanted shelves with pattern books where women

leaned like men having beers in a bar after work,
chatting with women on the other side of the counter or with each other.
Silent in spells. Searching the headings: dresses, blouses, lingerie;
men's and children's clothes, home decorating, costumes

in thick Butterick, McCall's, Simplicity, or skinny, expensive Vogue.
On the other side of the counter, stacked wooden drawers
labeled according to pattern make and number: McCall's 5051-5562.
Inside, the sizes ordered, too, from small to large.

Behind the women pondering the catalogues, terraces of threads,
more lovely than a flower garden. Orange-red fading to lemon yellow,
the slow-fired moods of summer, graceful degradations of blue:
navy to royal to sky to powder, then blue-green, aquamarine, turquoise,

rippling, changing like the sea. Seven, ten, twenty, thirty-four,
thirty-six inch zippers. Mostly metal, tongue tab painted to match, some
newfangled, "invisible"-plastic, not flat but bumpy, little hump
of spine on spine up your back with a teardrop at the top.

The smell of old wood-church pews on Sunday, lemon polish.
Women chanting, soughing pages, soft scuff of fans.
Summer cool and winter moist, private place above the clatter
of general merchandise. Remnants stacked, fabric bolts laid out

on their side like narrow corpses or poised,
upright, one thin arm dangling like a slender
ballerina's at rest, others circling a table so the June-Taylor-Dancer
view from the top would suggest a wheel, each spoke a shaft of color,

solid or patterned. Plaids in August, wools in September.
At Christmas, gold lamé and velvet-emerald, royal blue, burgundy,
scarlets-deep and rich as the thick flow of an artery.
Choirs of thread, altars of material; zippers and seam bindings

wick-white votives waiting for a wish, buttons stitched
on cardboard, arranged like holy cards in metal racks.
The Church of polished cotton, plush wool, organdie, batiste,
rayon, linen, crepe. With nap and without nap. An easy faith to keep.

 

Seeing the Elephant

Pythagoras's Theorem hold that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, or x2 + y2 = z2. According to Fermat's Last Theorem, no exponent other than 2 fits this equation.

Imagine loving an elephant.
A woman I know keeps two

in her house on the shore of Lake Michigan.
They live on the opposite side of a long

glass wall. She loves them both,
more, some say, than she loves

her husband, though surely he loves them too,
since cleaning and feeding such a pair takes

at least two. When the weather is warm
they bathe in the lake. Imagine a man and a woman

swimming with elephants on a summer night,
air and water the same temperature, for elephants

are prone to colds despite their tough
skin thick as linoleum

on the floor of their Michigan home.
Think of them sleeping, the whole house breathing,

the sweet ponderous dreams of elephants spreading
beyond the margins of proof.

 

Lemons

This morning, we raked the lemon tree,
pulling its upper limbs
closer to the ground,
filling our sack
with an extravagance of yellow.

The whole tree shimmered
like desire, like light
on moving water,
inestimable and curious in its logic,
a mirror whose broken face
partners darkness and light.

And our small
human histories unraveled.
We were pebbles washed on shore,
the moment brilliant but brief
as a green flash of sun.

There are such moments
when the body is alert,
when all that matters
is the bag filling up.

Later, driving out of that valley
with its blond and emerald fields,
I saw a woman
pausing in the shade beside
a blue sack of potatoes.
Behind her, a stand
of eucalyptus trees,

their shaved bark the color
of cinnamon we might use in tea
along with the juice
from our lemons.

As we watched each other speed by,
the lantern of awareness
flickered again in the dark
rooms of thought. I glimpsed
a feather on the wing of the bird
that lifted us both in flight.

 

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