Published on: 3/5/2010
A Thought

My grandmother at seventy-five
was still a giant of depression dinners,
potato salad with cornflakes or capers,
anything left in the icebox,
but three years later she was senseless.
She would tell me to take off the red hat
I had not worn since I was a child.

Gods like old men
fall down the stairs
into language and its rough taste,
their meanings splintered
like shin-bones.
They dream of workhouses,
plenty-houses full of children and harvest dinners
and end up fumbling in the garage, between
the baling wire and the canning-jars.

When father dies we will take a body
to a white office on Larimer street.
This when he spits for us flowers of blood,
looks in the toilet and sees a piece of his heart.