3 Poems

by Jayne Pupek

VALLEY NOTES

When you are old and live alone,
dying alone is anticipated. The hand you
grasp is your own, the odors the body
gives off are ones you recognize, only sharper. Even rank.
During moments like these, a house fills up with sounds,
not of people, but of ghosts and sometimes,
of machines. The black Singer downstairs
whirs like a primitive insect trapped under glass
or pin-stuck to cardboard before expiring.
(These things thrill a boy.) Suddenly
your skin is laced with stitches and regret,
and while there are places you didn't cut,
that doesn't matter much now.
As a girl, your hand got wedged in the wringer
and for a moment, it seemed the whole room
might gnaw its way up your arm.
Your mother said this should teach
you a lesson, but you forgot what
you learned because you didn't write it down.
Sometimes you failed to pay attention,
even when it mattered, especially then.
Not far from where you lived,
stood a house with peeling shutters.
Late November, the year nearly gone,
the occupant fell down the cellar stairs
and broke her hip. On makeshift shelves,
stewed tomatoes pulsed inside jars
opaque with dust. Upstairs, acquired
birds twittered inside their cages.
After their keeper died, all the small birds perished.
One large bird survived by eating
the flesh from its own breastbone.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

TUESDAY AFTERNOON

So you came with your books and an egg salad sandwich.
Did I want half you asked, and just because you looked so hopeful,
I said I wanted the whole thing, not a piece, not even
a three-quarters portion, but the entire sandwich. All of it.
And you said okay, so I took the sandwich
and sat with you on the step outside my apartment
and ate the whole of it, even though
it was not to my liking. The bread was all wrong
and tasted stale, and you hadn't added any relish or pickles.
I could tell that you'd tried to jazz it up
with Miracle Whip, but that isn't the same as mayo.
Worst of all, I bit into a piece of shell
and could almost see your nervous fingers
peeling the egg too quickly
because I'd telephoned and pretended to be
an obscene caller watching you
undress through the open window
where you soak paint brushes in jars
of soapy water, turpentine.
Sometimes when I know you aren't home,
I walk by your window because I want to see
the smudges your thumb leaves on the glass.
I want to be the burnt sienna loading your brush,
the raw umber staining your flesh.
I'm not ready to tell you this,
just as I can't tell you the reason
I ate your whole sandwich
was to prove how much I'm worth.

______________________________________________________________________________

THE PROOF

This is how I'll know you love me:
If you leave handwritten notes

in all the small corners
I frequent in a day, beginning

with the bottom of my coffee cup,
continuing along the white

cylinder of toilet paper, in between
the nearly flat bristles of my toothbrush,

on the mirror inside my compact
and the insole of my left shoe,

across the walls of the subway station
beneath the guardrail I fondle on the way down

the library steps, between the bricks
crisscrossing the fabric shop front,

inside the organic market, on the skins of red
tomatoes and the white kernels of corn,

on the parking ticket I'll get this evening,
and the stub I kept from last week's show,

along the edges of the twelve dollars
I have left until payday,

on the last fifty pages of the book
I'll never finish,

and here, inside my thighs.
Let your stains be the proof.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Jayne Pupek is a novelist and poet from Richmond, VA. (USA) Her novel, Tomato Girl, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books (2008). Also published in 2008 from Mayapple Press, was her first book of poems, Forms of Intercession. Primitive (chapbook) is available through Pudding House Press. Jayne's website.