Oh, my poor, sweet country mouse.
All that glisters is not gold.
Did you know that? Did you know it’s glisters,
not glitters? Well, it is. Whatever you learned there
in that one-room schoolhouse or pistachio-green
cinder block institutional monster half-wit factory
where you spent, I’m sure, many happy years–
well, anyway, it’s wrong, dear.
If you come with me, I’ll teach you
the right way to say things, and together
we’ll unlearn all your “rustic” manners.
Who knows? Maybe you can teach me a thing or two!
How to churn butter, perhaps, or the proper way to skin a deer.
Darling, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You didn’t know better then,
when you were seven years old and eight, picking your nose
and wearing hand-me-down cotton nightgowns, faded and softened
by someone else’s body. You didn’t know when you were barefoot,
half-naked and oblivious in your own front yard, in the dirt
where the chickens scrabbled by the flagpole.
Soon I’ll have you shining like a brand new wheat penny,
your mind as tight as a drum, your limbs firm and smooth,
and everything — everything — ready to be admired.

But the pony was already running
when it came to the fence. I only
didn’t stop it; I didn’t make it run,

and now its eyes are
and its legs are
and I’m sorry that

I only did what I was told, which was
not worrying about the pony anyway,
no matter how many times it hit

that fence
or jumped over,
spooked by

snow and cars, snowflakes whirling
in headlights and in eyes gone white
not with impact but with knowing.

Volunteers reported sightings in pine trees of Chicago
of various amorphous birds which could not be roused
to much concern as men and women in denim workpants
invaded the trees with outstretched hands. Birds lit
on arms and hair, heads and faces, and everyone —
birds and people alike — chittered with delight.
This was in January 2016, you see, not so long ago,
but a time when delight was still possible, birds
still possible — and pine trees, men, women,
life still possible, as we described and felt it then.

This lapsang souchong,
Dare to try,
knife and fork over
Tales of the City
You’re a born Mary Ann
if ever I saw one.
Intense orange excellence,
frangipani and pineapples
Oh, the ache,
the old ache
in old leg,
no new couches to sleep on,
cities and teas,
a sky brown with snow.

This is what I want —
an invocation or a memory
untainted by ’60s Methodist
abstract stained glass or
having been kissed

in the church kitchen,
an old man’s  sweaty cheek
smearing my glasses.

I want tiny cups of grape juice,
dusty sighs and offertory envelopes,
paper bulletins and golf pencils
to draw on them. Do I want

’80s Jesus to come back,
those days to come back, only
this time I would yell
for my mother, in the next room,
decorating long tables
for Easter dinner? I didn’t yell —

I went out to the playground,
sat on the jungle gym, thought
how everything had changed.

And it had.

The skyscraper church
in downtown Chicago —
far from Dayton, Ohio —
rings out the doxology,

Wesley hymns, and I’m sorry
to be separated from my music,
startled when I know all the words.

Splendid flippers,
if only they were webbed.
I used to say they were like
pounded veal cutlets,
flat as frying pans after
the weight of two children
and all of it, all of it.
Impossibly wide.

I think of my mother’s feet,
tiny double-A’s, N for narrow,
which mine once were, too.
What a division between us,

small but important, when
mine exceeded their limits,
became unlike hers.

Now, they are a solid medium.
B.

If you traced around them
and drew a pair of shoes to fit,
they’d never look like shoes —
except maybe the kind that
look like rubber feet.

It’s as if they’re the base
of a statue. It’s as if I’m
the mother Sea Monkey
in the ads, with flippers
and a crown of flesh —

as if, in having these children,
I evolved backwards, became
some briny new queen.

Statsny looked out at the moon
but couldn’t see it.
He was not a hard-boiled guy;
his wrists were like pink baby arms
with feathers.
The moon looked in at Statsny
but didn’t see him.
It was not the kind of moon
that goes around caressing faces
through windowpanes,
bringing dreams.

Let the melatonin ponies
nuzzle your sacrum, lip you
over into a field of poppies
or under the rope to the
deep end before you can
realize, fight yourself awake.
You’re just a little boat,
a pleasant little tugboat, say,
not a garbage scow circled
by ravaging seagulls. Ponies.
Remember the ponies, how
their eyes command you
toward sugar cube dreams.

One thing I appreciate about Twilight Zone is
that it is unprejudiced against urban life.
That is, hell may occur in sunny suburban lanes
or in smoke-clogged tenements of sirens, noise,
but heaven may also be in a crowded brownstone
of strangers become friends, and there’s
nothing wrong with taking the bus to work,
shelling out your nickels and dimes, even if
you’re a woman. Think of Carol Burnett
in that one episode, doling out cookies
and blandishments, the countless everyday
greetings of a certain kind of city life,
until her guardian angel comes and
fouls things up, places her in a mansion,
a tiara on her head, battered by rounds of
applause, empty praise from puffed-up
know-nothings at the kind of party where
a single high-heeled shoe is found
the next morning. The answer, of course,
was to put her back where she was,
leaping for joy up the steps of her home,
almost crashing into the mailman.
So many separate orbits intersecting,
so many ways to be happy, live a life,
no need — if you don’t dig it —
for wasp waists and pearls, wide lawns,
a cultured accent to use on the phone.

People who will help you
start this new year fresh,
assemble all your best ladders
in garages all over town.
No time for garden walls now,
walks in the sand or over
the hot biscuits of time.
In January is the clean slate,
the no more sugar plums, only
your arms, your breath,
the thoughts in your head,
the people you can meet.