varicose veined
warm brine-brimmed cedar bureau,
you smell like my home.
polyurethanes that cover your bare bones
straddle varicose veins holding baby’s shirts until your legs go blue.
like pastries and babies
and lavender oil dropped delicately on flaking windowsills,
dripping incense flame into cold air
and the moths that flew in to see me.
you hold my days in your wintry cabinets,
keeping the parts of me I bring to others
and holding those parts of me nearer,
knowing I can take them to new places, but that I always come back.
you don’t fold for me, but you’re there.
I do appreciate you.
even though I slam you shut. I love you, I do.
your hinge just needs greasing --
I say will get to it. I never do.
it is dark and it’s crying
but you hold up anyway. it’s not a choice, you say.
you taste like cereal-soaked milk
and I thank my lucky charms for my goddamn patience
for letting you sit as long as you did,
so I can slurp up the strawberry-frosted pop-tart cherry coke silk
from my bowl before you tell me it’s time to go,
so you can sweep together all the things I throw at you
and concoct something new — pulled pork,
pulled pores, witch hazel,
brews, apple stews, oatmeal muffins, rose perfumes
-- so you can turn nylon winter coats burning on a dusty radiator
into warmth
and hard-raked blisters into soaked knits
drying on the edge of the wall
(and how you keep the house from burning down, even with all the clothes hanging on the heaters)
-- you turn love from
the dirt on the bottom of everything,
tracked in from the yard,
the kind that’s dusty and gets everywhere and makes it impossible to walk on the kitchen floor without socks,
you smell like outside with a hint of warm brown sauce
you are inside with a hint of hemlock, angel mixed with a slice of warlock
cedar coated with plastic additives
a tiny stock of life.
i never really say it.
and as the paint ages, it dries, and cracks, and chips, and flakes,
sending musical plastic fragments onto the linoleum floor.
I never really say it, I think I don’t really know why
I spend my days worrying how long this coat will last.