those weren’t excuses
I really was marking papers and waitressing and
pulling the dishwashing actions of a life into center,
the dirty bits of things
swept into my palm.
I’d love to get together
but I have a job. And then I plunged my hands back
into the murky water, cat-food hardened
on the dishes, crustaceans of yesterday
catching up with me too fast,
no, there is no time,
clean up, step up,
go to bed and begin again–
washing undiminished. Up, down
and across I rushed –even then
the curtains were falling down
(if I’d had curtains)
and the cats needed attention
(if they hadn’t been sleeping).
–in the background there’s the father unadorned,
the boyfriend turning in circles like a pigeon–
–the friend with eyes like buffed chestnuts
the mother’s hands limp with soaked shirts–
Below, and above, a cloud with a distinct smell
idles strangely–
ii) tapestry of isolation
after a while you wonder
what busy means anyway:
time for only
one arm around you?
poverty: when there’s never enough for you.
consciousness: at last you see
everyone’s tied to the tracks.
but still you have to tie yourself to something solid
and so the busy brick appears
and you hang on–
iii) tapestry of isolation
and when you’ve accumulated a lot of it?
It crumbles into pocket-lint
and single silver dog hairs and crumbs
from morning after morning.
I bet that’s what it does.
And the crumbling happens at the beginning,
or does it take years?
Years.
iv) tapestry of isolation
In the beginning you walk with plates balanced on your head
up the Avenue of the Americas.
Pedestrians rush like stock-hawkers, manic shoppers
against the future.
You do it to prove you can.
But I bet that was always happening,
even before you started the balance. The rushing
and the which-a-way walking. And like the others
you were so afraid your body would leave you.
v) tapestry of isolation
for the first time since the house burned down
I am living with rugs.
How much they hold. Each strand so loyal
it stands firmly in its pattern of printed roses;
roses holding
a footprint, crumbs, or feathers, things
from all over, including the direction the vacuum passed in.
(you can vacuum but
things stay unclean)
Rug, so internal, so at home, so domestic!
Womanly it spreads across the floor,
doing exactly as I ask,
holding like a breath its wearing.
And what’s unwanted inside its weave, it holds in.