Yeah, it was the ‘50s, still nobody  
tied her in her apron to the stove,
though it might have appeared so to a passerby—
the way sometimes she didn’t move much at all,
leaning hard against the corner of the range
to become just another moving part 
in a self-propelling machine,
where she—and there wasn’t much of her—
could reach any of the burners
with a shake of paprika, or toss in half a cube of bouillon,
and a cup of water she might have earlier
fetched from the sink, just in case.
 
She didn’t need to taste to know.
The same way one look at me—
a frequent and lone passerby waiting for dinner,
but content enough watching her—
and she’d feel my head for fever
or accuse me, and rightfully, of taking change from her purse,
or schlepping from the pot when her back wasn’t turned, 
or asking, don’t you have more homework to do?
There was something in the way the sauce bubbled,
or the chicken didn’t sit right in the pan
or the rice wasn’t sticky enough—and we liked it that way—
that spoke to her in ways that never made the recipe,
except for the one she always carried in her head.

for Freddy Schild
 
You can look all you want
to the science of sharp edges,
but if you walk round the earth
against the setting sun and never stop,
time might relent in its awful course
and give you time to think.
You’ve tried to do what’s right,
pay your debts, be a man,
but no matter where you turn
you meet the shadow of your father,
and that darkness he bore
becomes more and more your own.
 
Might as well walk backwards—
and watch him in the mirror,
the razor stropped to a rhythm
that might have been the pounding of your heart.
And the soap slowly brought to a lather,
with those circular movements you memorized
from the time Time began, and how
what looked so impossibly cold
could possibly warm a face.
As he did himself in four smooth strokes,
you watched breathless, eager, scared.
Then he took your small face
in one broad butcher’s hand,
held it to the back of the blade