Two Poems
AN INVENTORY OF MOTHERS AT MOMMY & ME GYMNASTICS
would exclude me
but not out of meanness. I don’t
think they think that mother equals care, father
absence, the kind, like smoke,
that you can smell. Or that there’s something
particularly unmasculine
about kneeling down to cup
your child’s alembic neck
so it won’t snap as she rolls
backwards down a foam ramp that seems
to have been made from a clown suit,
some poor red-nosed sap anonymous and glum
in oversized boxers and hobo makeup juggling
crème pies in the cold of my mind
as a squad of three-year-olds safely tumbles.
It’s about alliteration. A preference
“for euphony more than truth” (Socrates
to Hermogenes), for how “rhythmic patterns
confer a strange sense of wholeness
and inevitability” (Louise Glück), and this
compels us to condone or do or say things we
otherwise would or shouldn’t. Think surf
and turf. Or puggles. Practice
makes perfect. Shock
and awe. My god, what a whiff of assonance
will let you get away with.
A dab of mellifluity and let the stinger
do its perforating dance
through any region it thinks needs aeration.
Because who doesn’t love
a slogan coiled like a jack in the box?
A wallop on a loaded spring, a motto you can’t help
but mutter so its syllables can roll
like buckshot in the cupped hand
of your mouth? I cup
my hand around her neck
and she rolls backwards, spine
unsnapped, grin fizzing as she dashes
to the trampoline where she jumps,
catching a little bit of air, floating
for a moment like a sound
that means absolutely nothing
except how it feels
to rise and fall
and falling, rise.
AMERICAN DREAM
Somehow the lists got switched
so now when darkness trips
the streetlamps in a single flick
I stand on the porch and yell
for Operation Total Fury
while the radio announces new
troop callups for Eloise.
Sometimes, once we’ve gotten her
to sleep, we wonder on the couch
between commercials if we shouldn’t
have named her Perfect Arrow,
after my mother, or maybe Operation
Ineluctable Flame — the year’s most
popular name, yes, but as the wine
tightens its grip we concede it’s got
a ring to it. The news anchors lather up
and rinse the war’s many wigs, highlighting
momentarily important looks:
Genevieve repelling insurgents in
the north, Isabel stalled as storms
comb the bogs and forests of the west,
and Penelope almost done
shoring up the eastern flank so it
can rally with Bayleigh and Lakynn,
and begin the critical pincer move needed
to relieve beleaguered Taylee. We
find the names absurd. Nowhere
near as mellifluous as Luminous
Spear or Unrelenting Vengeance.
Imagine, we say to each other, planting
a victory garden for Winifred instead
of Scarlet Trident. Celebrating
the smallest inch achieved by Megyn
instead of Justice Fusillade.
To ration every glittering teaspoon
of sugar and every phosphorous flare
of empathy for Mackenzie so this meager
plenitude might help us deceive ourselves
that despite her hunger her damage will
somehow spare us too.