You looked at me
As if I were a broken muse
Jagged instead of smooth
A cracked carapace
A bag no longer containing God
And in this moment of your breath
I was a face for the morgue
The crematorium,
With the sifting of ash
To be your repentance-
The discovery of the shelf of a cheekbone
To be the only thing that held
The disappointment in alignment
Up to your rueful eyes

He gave me a ring
With its facets glazed and cracked
Insisting it was once his great-grandmother's
She who
In rot-edged vintage photos
Wore a mink stole and flapper beads.
_____________

She pulls at seams
Takes up and brings down hems,
The stole pushed to the back
Of a web festooned attic
In a steamer trunk slapped with decals:
Moscow
Austria
Monte Carlo
Rio de Janeiro.
On cold days she wears it again
Dancing to old melodies on rough boards
And when she hears the front door slam
It's made to disappear in haste,
Her engagement ring clacking
Against the trunks flip locks.
That night as she makes biscuits
For her breadwinner she sees
The crack, the chip
Through a glaze of milked flour.

A cigarette is pathetic tinder
For lighting a revolution
In a house were curtains are drawn
Against all outside movement
And trinkets of an affair
Are cast away with casualty
Or slipped between the pages
Of books no one will read-
Dense things
With a sense of malice
Scratched into their surfaces,
Un-dyed by the sun

She collects the rice after weddings
Looking for prophecies in her cupped palms
Searching each grain for a story.
She thinks of the children they ought to have
And their names with deeper meanings:
Against birth, defender of man.
A blonde girl
And a precocious boy
Who she knows will one day learn
The language of suicide
Their starfish hands
Never to be the pickers of rice

My grandmother's bones
Provide the support
To my empty rib cage
Evening the structure;
Her disappointment
Would be something great.
Taciturn tea leaves
In a ceramic urn
Allow some comfort
From their steam
While the lines
On my palm lie-
My bracelets of fortune
Can't be that short.

Smoking is a working class disease
They said; he smiled at this.
Lean in body and broad of mind
With shirtsleeves rolled,
A modern man's philosopher
Who stuttered over the words
Like his fingers did over her chassis
Detroit rolling iron beneath his palms
Grease and lubricant under the nails.
The cigarette cherry glows in the dark
Giving him a hard edge aura  
The gloaming settling into the lines
Of his work-worn face