The Tinkerer's Daughter Fixes Things

-

The Tinkerer's Daughter Fixes Things

    or, Learning to Pump


Then after months of flopping around 

she felt it, hope tightening 

with her tummy as all 29 pounds and pigtails

curved like a pink comma on the pollened page

of air where she paused,   then flew

forward like the latter half 

of the thoughts that come barreling  

from the class-five of her mouth

in the car after school, so fast 

she nearly snagged her bare foot

on the cloud’s crab-claw, which no one

saw—her father in the shed,

her mother flipping sweet potato fries

for dinner—so she climbed down  

and ran to where the dog elongated

in equinox light, leaned over to rest 

her hands on the sun-warmed barrel 

of his chest and shouted into his ear flopped

like a cup to catch what bubbled

there, Odie, I just learned how 

to pump, to which didn’t jump up

or howl his hooray but just lay 

without reply, though she didn’t seem to mind

but ran on, not needing the push

of anything or anyone anymore

but whatever that fresh-felt rhythm and rush

to send her pressing forever her feet

into the wet cement of sky.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Line of Thinking

-
THE LINE OF THINKING The line of thinking runs  that given time enough—the funds— we might yet get in front of this.  That one day honey just does the list, and lo, the fixer-upper’s up and fixed,  the lawn at last trimmed low and all the laundry done, so give  it but a week or so and we'll at last begin to live the life we always imagined as something more than a growing list of pending repairs.  Of course, all this will come to pass only after the ballots are cast, the offices swept and emptied out  for our officials, who will, no doubt,  enact our will and set right the deluded line of thinking we’ve too long been governed by. Then once the baby sleeps through the night— or say instead the baby graduates and vacates the house—that will be our ticket to kick up our feet the way we've dreamed about and somehow come to expect, when we’ll rest as deep and long as Orion in repose, belt unclipped and bow leaned back in that ever-elusive posture of "rel...
Read more

Real

-
Real The best yield the garden bore was before  we soiled the spot with seed, before Henbit and Bittercress became weed because we didn't plant them there, and the fence was neatly stacked  in lumber racks at the hardware store  with a pressure-treated chance at perfectly plumb.  Our significant others, too, kept their figures  firm as the flesh of a fresh cuke twenty years into our marriages  before we met them, their priorities in prim  rows well-tilled and running parallel to our own.  The summers were never dog-tick   hot, spouses always were, and our houses rarely  required repair, till we—our very real  bodies with their very real hungers tiptoeing for the ripe glint of it all at the top  of the trellis—found the beans were soft in spots and less than ideal, but still, once swimming in a thick confession of butter, infinitely more filling.
Read more

Unnecessaries

-
Unnecessaries Increasingly I’m noticing the world’s Unnecessaries.                         Different colored birds, A pine, a willow, and an oak, a squirrel Touting a bushy tail, or a yellow flower Beside a rose –                          A world requiring words Like adjectives and adverbs to name and shower It all with descriptives describing the differences. If we had only pines and roses and crows, A single type of bird and flower and tree, Or if day were switched to night without the show Of sunset sinking down beneath the hills, We’d still survive.                              But Artist’s desire beauty, And all the colors, shapes, and sizes fill The unnecessary role of satisfying the senses.
Read more