pith…

The soap opera organ announces
what we can hardly bear to hear.
A metal-aproned matron
summons the skin ribbons
she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500,
circa 1969. Her tremolo
is a casual torture. We mistake
her voice for a choir of a thousand
veiled mothers and wobble dutifully in
to an Easter dinner of wood duck and greens.
There are no roses
around our scarred 3-D hearts
or arranged in the centerpiece
absorbing what words we can pick
from our teeth. We are weary, heavy
weary, of managed creation
and sick from songs that tempt us only
to silence. We scrape cold beards
of frost with new buffed nails, screeching
at the April windows. Our fathers
were fools to store small-grained harvests
in such broad-slatted barns.
We watch the mess heap up
with the snow and the hyphens.
Nobody clears the faux-oak table
but the talkative furniture
does our dreaming for us
and a phatic nation learns to curse
in shrunken frontier tongues.

.

© joesmith 1999