Wednesday's daily poem (6/24/09)

If you like, go look for Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "In the Waiting Room". This poem is loosely based on the premise of that poem. It's not a completely fresh, daily poem. I've had some of it around for a few months. But it seemed like today was it's day.


In The Kitchen
after Elizabeth Bishop

How had I come to be here like them and overhear a cry of pain…?



It was early March and I was in the kitchen,
and my father who I already knew was easily confused
watched TV in the den,
and my mother, who had just turned 50 and disliked confusion
stood beside me, washing dishes.

And I was trying on what I would say—
the way I would present my news
as if it were a picture in National Geographic,
some notion we accept because we see it
like white bones pierced through ears and noses
or beetles brimming from the mouths of smiling children.
Without meaning to our lives would shift, make a place
for this strangeness.

I dried the dishes
my mother washed, her elbows above the suds
dimpled and glistened each time she placed a plate in the strainer.
The window above the sink a painting of her face on black velvet,
the buzz of the kitchen light.

When I said
Late, the glass in her hand smashed
as if a poltergeist had flung it
at the faucet, shattered back into the silky water
where bits of corned beef hash lifted
up off the wreck of forks and plates,
orts of white potato set adrift,
glass shards sinking like a thousand tiny hulls
of the Titanic.

Late,
I said again,
as if reading the caption
of a picture of myself by summer,
a ring of blood forming on my mother’s wrist.