1
Lisa, my niece, swings from the bristled rope
thick as her whole hand can grasp
hard as if to yank the tree down,
as if a dark, breathless mustang were on the other end
in the spotted clouds, and she will ride it;
she hurls herself, again and again, across the banks
of the Ironwood River, dry since June and jagged with rock
from the granite quarry. Like those early geniuses
of silent film, redoing the routine
a hundred seventy-six times,
charging full-tilt into a barnyard door
or rocking from the brass arms of a clock tower
forty stories high, until they got it right.
2
Anna, my grandmother, had had seven strokes and never
left her room at the top of the stairs.
Once my mother heard a rattle at two-
thirty in the morning and found her
down in the kitchen, baking bread.
She must have climbed on a chair
to reach the pans on the top shelf
behind the jar of brown sugar and the Lipton tea
and then the yeast at the back of the cabinet.
The eggbeater was on the counter
and the tiny brush to coat the crust with butter
as it came out of the oven.
She was standing, surrounded by bowls of warm milk
she had filled one by one, trying to remember
what for; my mother had never seen her
like that, crying so softly
as she sifted the flour and looked out the shuttered window
at the yard next door, the mown grass in the moonlight
just beyond the gentle fall of white powder.
© Robert Thomas, 1996
Poem originally appeared in California Quarterly.
Valley of Saying Home Page Poems by Robert Thomas