GDR CHINA
My housekeeper had the dishes brought
from Cuba. Her husband then had swapped
jewelry for a color TV and East German plates.
Gold pattern inside the rim, and beneath it
a burgundy stripe. Their sturdy forms are boring
and the white all too white, the porcelain
not diaphanous. Their history, though,
embellishes them. Communism clinging
to its hated bourgeois persona. We too,
the clanging dishes say, can refine
the daily bread of unequal toil. Here, free,
she cleans houses, is richer and happy
to let these memories go. She calls them
the balsero service for six. Germany one, Cuba
disintegrating. What meals history serves up.
LAMB
After the painting “Zanimo”[Animal] by Ernst Prophète
Otherwise, the pink
sky would denote
tenderness, a girl
fumbling through
her mother’s rouge.
But here a lamb trembles
knee-deep in a blue stream
watched by a wolf on the bank.
The earth, the sky are beaten red.
Calm plants punctuate,
wreathe the scene.
As if the slaughter
that must come
heralds accomplishment.
Is that the only amulet
against lamentation?
In truth, the wolf
has come late to the hope
of killing, for the lamb
in his blue gullet
has already been devoured
by time, as have been
the dry wolf and the merciful,
marching trees.
