I enter through a hole in the metal

fence, after or instead of school –

go sideways, hold thin to skim the rippers.

 

Beyond the woods, the cake lady invites me

to play house. I am sweet daughter,

she kind mother. She finds me first

 

at the golf course where I rescue stray balls

from the driving range – I pocket the ones with busted

skin to slice open

 

with a knife at home, hours of prying

off white armor to unspool miles

of rubber guts. Strings pop from the wound,

 

unspin from tight coil to limp pile. She bakes

me cakes every day for months.  Tawny waves

of cream crest off the surface, curls

 

of beckoning palm, sugared tongue.

In muddy shoes and jacket bulged with balls,

I eat my slice. She asks about my family,

 

why I’m not in school. I make stuff up,

eat another piece. In the woods going home,

a shock of  yellow-jackets sting my neck.

 

Welts cut off my breath.

He knocks me into the dirt,

pushes hard, my back

 

grinds into the roots.  Something breaks

at the top of my inside as golf balls fall

from pockets, endless threads of rubber

 

spool out around us, hands of rubber, legs

of rubber,  blood-dirt-slime there.

After the first time it will never hurt

 

again, he says. Stretched elastic scar

rubs against the branches overhead,

the fixed world snaps, no more

 

give.  Months after the last slice,

after the woods wrenched out my yearning

for cake, my yearning for the lady,

 

she calls to me in the grocery, calls

my name.  I make a stranger’s

face, turn away, turn towards my mother

 

in the checkout line. That chocolate cake

frosted and layered on a

glass plate. Dirt.

June nights my mother works the yard,

pruning American Beauties, dead-heading

petunias, the gummy velvet of spent petals

on her fingers. Tom Seaver

blows her a kiss from the t.v.

on the patio. She watches

his twist and muscle, prays

for extra innings, the floodlight

to come on, the kids

to stay in bed. I try

 

to remember what I know,

what I saw from behind the curtain:

edge the beds, cheer the Mets, wait

for morning to sleep –- never

happier than when she moved

in her own time.  I force the trowel

 

down, four inches for hyacinth bulbs,

tulips deeper for more dark, work-in

fatted narcissus: Sir Winston Churchill,

Pheasant’s Eye. How much icy

grip is needed for bloom?

 

I rub my knuckles, fret over

the spring to come.

These short days refuse

to budge. All I can do

is dig, grip this trowel

as if it is my hand that opens

the ground – as if I am

that trowel held by her.

 

That summer in the bungalow, Grandma grips

the things in her domain: cast-iron skillet, metal spatula, a carton

of double-yolked eggs. My nose at her elbow,

 

I watch shells split on the rim, conjoined suns

whisk to a single promise. The pan

pops with grease, bacon flecks in the scramble.

 

(Black walnuts fall around us,

still in their shell’s shell. The creek rushes with

thaw as we come closer on the path. Chubby

 

with grin, Grandpa kitzels me to catch a minnow

with my hands. I’m up to calves in cold flow,

an Iroquois hunter snatching trout).

 

Chessboard between us, I learn my moves: slanted bishop,

aggressive castle, sly knight, sacrificial pawn.

Trust no one, he warns, not even the girl across the field.

 

(I sneak to the abandoned tennis court

to meet her. We throw rocks at the ripped net, dig up

arrowheads, find a wallet with two twenties.

 

We each take a bill. Grandpa marches to her house

like a captain in the Cossack’s army – thief! –

on a mission to take back what’s mine).

 

Rain jabs the tin roof. A real soaker

overflows the water barrel, banks days

of good flushes, even a hairwash. I find

 

my father’s books and tsotchkes: three monkeys

frozen in jade –  hear no evil, see no evil, speak

no evil. I roll those chimps in dirty underwear to smuggle home.

 

(On the ride back I chew gum,

watch it all go – her palm on my cheek

before sleep – go.  Miles ahead a red fruit turns

 

on a pole, the Big Apple cafeteria the stop

for pie and Grandma’s annual lesson

in papering the toilet seat).

 

 

 

 

At 7:30 a.m.

every day he mows,

rides around and around

 

and around his yard— the revved beast

our daily dread. Neighbors

grumble under Sunday quilts

 

but nothing stops him.

Crew-cut grass salutes

the fuming machine,

 

the cropped green hisses

too short! His hair,

white and tangled, unshorn

 

since the war. That purpled face

peers between fence slats,

desperate to provoke

 

a complaint. Fenced-in

with heaps of metal, once-humming

motors: a 4-door sedan,

 

boat on blocks, a glider stilled

in vines and rust. He circles

the unfaithful, cuts right

 

up to those obsolete engines, livid

at the mounds of silent, stubborn junk.