What do you need to know?
1.
Martin was found
after his parents died.
He was crawling, diapered,
with hair grown past
his knees. His curved
fingernails clicked on the floor.
One side of Elaine’s body
moved, the other side didn’t.
Daniel had Down syndrome
and wanted a job like his father’s
but there was no work.
The village had a glut of people
darning their own sweaters
and smoothing plaster into cracking sheetrock.
I ran a sheltered workshop
in a basement far into the country
Artie put his cigar down
and talked about the junkyard
dealer: jobs there for all.
You don’t need to know
Artie worked for me, or
my travels on the backroads
to find jobs for my attendees
at farms with empty barns.
2.
The junkyard littered its way across
acres of oily sand and scrub, an engine coupled to a birch,
a hammer tied by grass.
The dealer and I walked around cars
spread like armored dancers,
stabiles of chrome fins
and mounds of diced glass.
The dealer’s young hound was dying
in the path to the backlot.
He bent over him, frowning;
from the time the sun appeared
to the time the sun set,
the dog’s sides quivered
and his tongue lapped gravel.
* * * * *
Wallpaper
I move a fishbone, a spoiled piece of tomato
to the side of my plate.
In my chair by the window –
aluminum frame, cold air –
I contemplate the apple tree
becoming gray then green, formidable in transformation –
my husband remains at the table, consuming
the sourness of the wrong plenty.
The tic beginning in my jaw
erases the routine I covet
as proof of my dominance
for the track worn in the rug,
the repetition of limit.
I look for the news and it can’t find me,
a queen of waiting
in a kingdom ringed with beds.