Four Square
Mornings I give thanks
to my nightly self
who sets the machine
for the coffee each
next day needs. Needs more—
but here’s this! Evenings—
tired and I wanna
go to bed—I work
to recollect, out
of the fragments, that
person tomorrow
can be grateful to.
When people say what
goes around comes home
this is the smallest
circuit they can mean.
Enthralled
Her dress swells in the wind
and her hair waving in it
resembles the tendrils of bougainvillea,
which in Greek is bougainvillea.
She stares, or is meant
to stare, at nothing,
which signifies something interior.
She stands as if astonished.
Sometimes her whole body
shivers stiffly in the designer breeze.
The swivel of her right wrist,
a line like a bracelet of black thread,
is turned in the downward orientation
that says: I am imagining
something bulbous I might seize for pleasure
or power, such as a gearshift.
Her left hand is hidden
behind the scarf thrown over her shoulder,
a shade to complement her dress and looking
as if it ought to tickle.
She can shrug it off
no better than she can shy away
from the shop front and her sister
across the doorway, lolling in a more
deeply pensive, downcast attitude.
For a while the owner
stood by them, still (except for her cigarette)
as the girls on the Acropolis.
