VOYEUR
My father sat a while under elms and moon
before driving off like the day we played
tug of war with him and his suitcase on the porch.
Hindsight is like longing through glass,
everything clear but out of reach, hardly titillating
had someone watched the two of them those last months,
besides us, I mean, immoderate perhaps,
as in a silent film, how she shook her head,
how he gestured as hard as she stood
her ground, not even a peck on the cheek.
He denied it was him in that stolid blue Ford
he was synonymous with, there perhaps
wondering if he’d done the right thing
or weeping over how much better the movie
might have gone. Perhaps he’d changed,
become the stranger who shamelessly admired her
at the start. We could almost see him
finding the nerve to confess only a fool would leave,
and if it didn’t work out he was lonely
in the next town. But the most he ever mustered
was that stare with which he’d once held her
attention, if not long enough to feel sure
she wasn’t the one looking inured,
as people get to love, craving something more.
~
THE LITTLE RED HEN
The one diligent thing he did was stay
gone once he left. Then she had to work
twice as much, designated you boss
of your older brother, his shame your reward
for being a natural with a broom, not responsible
for the daily debacles that more than earned him
the time he spent in a supperless room
or a Lewisburg prison. You had no trouble
heeding the fable, only with living
simultaneously in another, the lazy rat
also the prodigal son, your sick and tired mother
insisting you do it all harder because now
that he’s out he deserves you for his
emotional sedan chair. Here you are already
the breadwinning hero who returns
for the holidays and pays for the power
they threatened to shut off because she’s a deadbeat
despite two jobs, and she’s too chicken to shush
his sarcastic awe, the family’s dysfunctions
laid out like side dishes. You almost want
to pull his hair like when you were nine, wrestling
for the phone from which her voice squawked,
helpless not unwilling to get it done,
whatever it was. Maybe the moral
is somewhere someone else gets to make it up
while you sedulously beg forgiveness,
and at last you’re not hungry enough.
~
ANGEL FOOD CAKE
Whenever we visited my grandparents, my mother bowed
to formica and made amends
out of egg whites and vanilla for their son
marrying her against their advice.
Her color better matched the devil’s
dark alternative though she never tired of what had to be
her last ounce of sweetness beaten yet again
in the mixing bowl along with her secret,
dissident tears upstairs. That heavenly foam
engendered a confection feather-light as manna
the old bible fairy tale compared to cake.
When she served them they praised
the results of her labor like they’d slapped her
so gently it would appear
they’d stroked her flour-stained cheek.
For a moment, she was the help
the gallant patriarch lay with, not Cinderella
only pretending. I was consumed by this slight
my whole life, though by the end
of hers, it began to taste like grace.
~
STRAND
We wheeled my mother out the backdoor
more for us, the last trite sough of fresh leaves
she’d hear from the elm we blessed
by taking for granted until that April
they came to collect the hospice bed. Twelve hours
earlier, my father in his unzipped parka
picked a rose for her from her garden like it was love
at the start. Yet he did it perfectly
almost like he’d rehearsed for decades
giving back her gift, lovely
as when he drove off to marry someone else
and by and by improbably returned.
What a waste of time it all comes down to,
all the sacrifice and sitcom reruns
and tweezed gray hairs. She gave her life for us
however long it took, everyone sitting around
bored and awkward as ever. Except just by staring
down at her feet, she performed
last rites on the past, less like a priest than a ballerina
dancing herself to death
in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose strand
of melody at the end conceived
the whole piece, my mother dynamic
unto transcendence in the stillness
of her chair, in the green temple of morning,
among the wet grass and windblown blossoms,
paradise of the perfectly ordinary.
~
LOS PIÑONES
Is what they call the wildness
east of San Juan. It means the pines, and picture one
however stunted inching up like an outsider
to the tropics, an outcast with one boyish foot
elsewhere and a father with an accent.
Americano, I heard when they listened to me
because his parents insisted my mother not speak
Spanish. She warned of spiders and full-grown men
vanishing, the squall-tossed huts of the poor,
then not even, just lonesome coast,
a place of convocation for the addicts and cutthroats
of a nonetheless pristine world. The two of us,
you convinced me, because you were older,
were also beautiful, and you were right,
it felt like a foreign country at last
making love to me, so why not come home
to what wasn’t mine. I flouted riptides and sharks
because that’s where one went to be alone
with the wrong person, as if I weren’t, as if I didn’t
find my mother there too in spirit, holy ghost
in the trinity with me and shame,
the thought of you even now like a debt to her
hovering over me. You were every gull
and the glaring sun, how could I?
and unerring like the road I was on since
it was the only one, stubborn longing that got by
on nothing but tire tracks, a life-sized map in the sand,
two ruts that ended where the sea began.
~
David Moolten is the author of three books of poetry, Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University, 1994), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005), and Primitive Mood (Truman State University, 2009) which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. His verse has appeared in journals such as Poetry and The American Poetry Review, and is forthcoming in Narrative, Pleiades, and Literary Imagination. He is also a previous contributor to New World Writing.