Martha Zweig

Glove box rummages itself & dumps: fuzzy cough droppings & stuck (menthol) among them a misdirectional map intrigues me: say clotheslines’ fripperies hopping the breeze off the alley & garbage lids clanging downhill to the sea: say there in the sea floes of penguins bobbing up to Argentine flamingos. How hard is it to get lost? Listen to lost useless horses whingeing for home & hames, a lost grail stuffed with dirt deaf to human legends long unstrung of sacred tune & lost, children prodded along in the loops of war, hopscotch mistake, the cast stone skipped off the lake instead & lost the tournament to the nice policeman there with the ice cream precinct & his body buddy Dad. Dad declares he knows by the spit & stripe of her this’s no one of his own, his kids mope,& he goes. Ear to ear I must look lucky at last, librarian at the dictionary of things looking-up ever since I hid in the glove box, pretending to be directions.

I was just getting to that. But first, old age. If you could just let me finish. Once it was I who rudely interrupted proceedings: the chair rapped & called to order, but I seized from pending approval the minutes & ran off with the handsome mustachioed night watch. Matching wits we wound up jangling on a motel bureau in simultaneous alarm & ran down together to silence, Bide-a-Wee’s appointed guest in his sleep deceased so far from home he didn’t know a soul. A what? We heard Gideons rustling in the drawer, & as we rifled the fellow’s bags before we fled, & fled, his time flew too, from his cuffs &collars flapping ahead.

Poor devil, dog six years on a tether clipped to a cubby box. The sun dropped into a slot on one side & after a dark spell popped up on the other. Birds of a weather chattered along wires overhead & the yards around shrilled emergencies. Who knew? Once upon afternoon a dust demon spins itself up in the master’s tumbleweed to his match scratch: puff: mega blaze & four hours’ ruckus until doused out. I’ll bask three days in wonders. I’ll slobber & yawn. I’ll gnaw & grunt in my groin to my heart’s content. They say death changes a body’s mind about things. Master shuts up & just rots.

Nonentity’s birthplace: a front yard sweeps its dirt clean. Devil hopped up the oak tree, devil-take-the-profit seized a jay in the twigs by the feet, wings buffeting this child’s cheeks to rhyme. Leaf of gift box tissue folded over her pocket comb. Hind pocket kazoo. Won’t somebody please start something other & oddball soon, narrow her down out of folly & trivia to destiny? But Whynot the tortie cat flopped an irregular sunny patch, wriggles & rolls & revives the blissy fits of ignorance. Decades crunch as minor upcountry thunder. My nod to Mastermind’s robot rabbit, said to dwell in his top hat, who tips me a silk evening. Gloaming again & never far from home. Listen you hoots: alas for me, for my love with the gallant and grifter soul has tucked into just the crevice he feared. Fear told & tells him the truth, so he trusts it. Listen you hollers, whatever you had in mind for me.

We’d pout. Our mother, brisking off, urged Darlings! — your vitamins & minerals dissolve inside with the milk & this-&-that into instructions rejiggering more vitamins, minerals, milk & this-&-that to fizz up & turn into actual you, or me, or anybody & etc. Experiment: — you might let drop capsules & milk into spit in one another’s cups. Watch, wait; think, add, stir. I’ll be right back. One day it quits. The whole business quits. Imagine that.