The Estate Sale The squirrels are skulking up and down the eaves; the fattening month is here. In pairs, we pole each other around the rooms; we’re content to be led, and, pliant bidders, we bend. We palm her wigs, collect her closet’s brood of shoes, and sift through dog-eared, bristling furs, elephantine skirts as sheer as moth’s wings, and leggings veined with runs. We’ll go away with ashtrays bearing monogrammed kerchieves, with hatboxed china, and the TV trays we’ll later sell on e-bay. Spent or broke, we’ll find—in death’s uneven prudence—room for more: her wooden fruits and cloth tulips, her shatterproof bric-a-brac. All will cope; the next of kin will manage what they must: utility bills and dirge, while the rest will harvest proof that, stitch by stitch, her life is bound to someone’s dresser, bed or chair— familiar now, like steps we’ve hollowed out on stairs, where our treads coalesced to one.
Colossal Squid in Combat
It’s said the monster wrestles whales; clamping its tentacles around one’s back, its musculature pressed against the blubber in grand sprawls of suckers, teeth, and whirling hooks, its mass contorting in darkness, it grants this compact of bodies recorded in Atlantic foam. They’ve been glimpsed off Newfoundland’s coast grappling in slick embrace, although (here an annotation’s fastened to the tale) rarely do the fiends make of their tryst, meat. More often, interlinked (think of a chokehold’s precise architecture), they die before victory, together, and drift across the floor, the way furniture glides around a room during a lifetime. In the end, the long-tottering leg will break off the chair, the squid will dangle, then drop away from its purchase, lacy with decay. Its endnote will scuttle along the bottom of the page, pedantic and vain.
For a Frog Caged, at home in a glassed country, you, basker, take to the walls, balled into the angle of penitence: eyes lidded, asparagus-limbs tucked in, pointillist belly on display: just a thumbnail thing mosaicked and edged with larvae eggs, planets, and marbled fleas. I could mistake the belly for map, the frog for token or decor: a pellucid brooch, maybe, or worse: a captive of my need, a prince tricked into compression-a cipher for all overlooked or misperceived things. You’re equal to my mishandled love, my delicate and hard-to-keep creature, whose mood matches all the species of forest green and swaps their shades to stay intact. Your belly though is a worry; the fine, visible tracery of your tract seems to be a debacle of translucence. Still, your dart and scamper are sensible, given my hold, keeper in locus parentis, whose care becomes a cage and will-anxious, other-- turns us against ourselves. In escape, you misread your leap and land, little filament-legs readied, as I dive and clutch, scaring you into zones beyond human reach.