Our Lady


Our Lady of Perpetual Surprise is how
she looked after she had her eyelids

lifted.  Who is this stranger I must
be kind to? Where is the dark one

who couldn't feed me?  She went under
the knife and dyed her hair blonde.

After a splendid day at the beach
he dropped dead in the hall, she

in the kitchen saran-wrapping coldcuts.
The next year she spent looped 

on pep-up pills, playing duplicate bridge,
traversing the distance between them

that way.  I crept down to rec rooms
foraging for crumbs from pimply-faced

boys, their clumsy tongues.  Surfacing
for air, I too smelled of Old Spice.

I was a stitch in her side, a splinter,
a thorny reminder.  I was her darling,

her liebchen, her sweetie pie.  Oh Mother, 
what big eyes you have, and wide.





Pretty Stories, Funny Pictures


When my mother dies I will not
visit her grave.  No matter where
she makes her final bed, the plot
my father saved for her, or cramped

beside her beloved.  She's already left
me my inheritance, those grisly tales
which steel the heart--Struwwelpeter
who lost his thumb, the one he sucked

(as I did mine) to the natty tailor
tiptoeing at night with giant shears.
Or the matchstick girl who refused
to eat and let her hair grow wild.

Ravens nested there.  I was the obedient
child.  But when she dies the truth
will out.  I am her daughter.  I won't
visit.  I will be otherwise engaged.





Nude Study
for Miroslav Holub


He ran experiments on nude mice, testing
the workings of the thymus, how the body 
adjusts to heat and cold.  He bred them

too, although he couldn't use the females 
to nurse because young ones need fur 
to get a grip.  I asked if mice knew 

when they were nude, picturing my dog 
cringing under the kitchen table 
when I trim her for the summer, and how

sheep bolt and duck when they are shorn. 
He was a scientist.  He didn't take 
the question lightly.  "I doubt," he said, 

"they know they're mice."  Nude,
he'd said, not furless or hairless
or bald, as though they wore clothes

they could remove at night and felt
shame.  Like that time at Crystal Lake 
we campers (all prepubescent girls) 

were treated to a skinny dip on the Fourth.  
All ran in and splashed with great abandon, 
all, that is, except for me, mummy wrapped

in garish beach towel.  And must you know
what you are to know you're nude?  Mice 
don't know they're mice and I didn’t know what

I was hiding or hiding from, but something 
must have been stripped from me 
and I couldn't bear to have it rubbed in.



All these poems appeared in The Royal Baker’s Daughter (Felix Pollak Poetry Prize, University of Wisconsin  Press).