| Two
Poems Mandy Michno |
|
|||
Bread Bakery mornings, a thin apron, checkered red-and-white. Brisk sash offers a waist, the shutters pushed wide: someone else's hours, simple as cinnamon. It's as if you were born old, prepared for pigeons and staunch tweed, thistle-pulling and the hard cast of an iron. Buttonhooks spoke forgotten occupations -- fletcher, cooper, farrier -- the yearning to make a trade. My datebook for your horses. For your woodbins, your carvings, your habits and devotions. *** |
In a way, work was the stone pitched from a riverbank, value uncertain. Beating the dough with fists, there was nothing you could say was wrong. You shower daily. No desire for plagues, infections, the dangers of pre-antibiotic society; you are neither Gothic nor consumptive. Unbidden, a knife entered the thought of your mouth, sharping down the center of your tongue. Your eyes tighten, but it kept on: a divided tongue, anonymous but rooted in the mouth's wet ground, streaming new metallic blood. ***
 |
|||
