A FEAR GROWS IN MY HEART
(after the Yiddish of Celia Dropkin)
the way a kitchen’s dirty washcloth
smell, tinctured with the pee of long-
dead dogs, feels after a month of rain:
rotten as a root canal. Alcoves I refreshed
with curtains, a bedspread thick with fair-
trade organic cotton batting: where did
that get me? In three pandemic years,
I’d shrugged at my number coming up.
Now all numbers figure in percentages
for a-fib, melanoma, clots, morning’s
kimono sleeve enrobed in flame: sad,
my teakettle’s become a calculated risk.
Also scary: fancy bedding and silk drapery,
all that will survive me––this skirt, shelves
of indispensable books. Or outlive me:
a tortoise in Galapagos. Sun-budding
corms of daylilies from the farm we sold.
Tusked ivory. Bright diamond-cut world.
ART
The sculptor––whose name I can’t remember––cast in resin, so the University installed giant fans to air the garage where he worked.
A series of forms the shape of Hershey’s kisses, but lined up like teeth in a jaw, he called “Cannibal Forest.”
He played that song again and again to me in the dinette, needle etching out the grooves.
The bright of Gloucester, blazing as soon as you exit 128––fifty years after Ann Arbor,
I care what became of my housemate and his girlfriend Anna, the ambassador’s daughter.
Winter walls insulated with newspaper that sifted through cracks, the rental glowed with energy like the mansions Hopper painted by the sea.
Or maybe with pheromones of youthful ambition you can almost smell in “Freight Cars,
Gloucester,” ready to burst its geometries––Hopper, four years married, his grasses like flame.
Jo, who showed her watercolors with Picasso––in the studio her money bought, she’d paint whenever Edward didn’t.
He did a watercolor of her in the act, one she hated.
Bob and Anna plotted a homestead outside Raleigh, where Bob “digs holes in Mother Earth, pours concrete into their shapes, then stands them up against Father Sky.”
Google unearthed my sculptor, boyish at 70––but nothing about Anna.
Fifty years ago Hopper painted Gloucester fifty years ago.
One installation, lit at night, spirals like a Slinky or a gyre out of Yeats; monumental, red with oxides from Carolina soil, centuries will weather it.
In Hopper’s oil portrait Jo looks away, brushes in the foreground, canvas outside the frame.
