Shore Leave, July
On Sundays, I’d wake
to the sound of the Toyota
pulling from the drive.
I’d imagine you then—
shooting down the highway
lined with big box stores,
their quiet parking lots
a kind of church
tacky with spilled soda.
An hour later, you were back
with the flimsy, careful box that held,
as always, eleven donuts—
powdered and plain and powdered again.
And the one for me, your eldest daughter—
glazed, the honeystuck heart of the bunch,
moonround and drumtight,
puckered as a kiss.
The Poppies, the Grandmothers
Petals as oily-soft
as a grandmother’s hands,
as red as lips after WWII,
riveters
playing femme fatale
in the land of danger and plenty.
Like grandmothers,
these blooms can make you sleep,
their pollen a factory of bedtime stories.
Like grandmothers, they mean remembrance,
blowing their short lives away
in the fields of great wars.
Each stalk stands for a soldier down.
Each grandmother for one who came home,
bought a Buick, earned a pension, ate steak
until the heart attack that felled him
like an oak in a hundred-year storm.
But still the poppies bloomed
from their strange green nut-like buds
and the grandmothers remained, ladling
soup from vast pots like cauldrons,
lighting Virginia Slims at kitchen tables
and recollecting the fields around them,
counting forth the lost and saved,
each grandchild, each hillock,
each seed and each ocean,
before drying up like history itself,
before crumbling like paper,
like all books read too often,
improperly and lovingly kept.