The Milliner (published in Long Island Sounds-2007; honorable mention - New Millennium Writings, 2008)
In the good times
papa left the house at 6AM
for his factory on 37th Street
to arrive before his hundred girls
who worked machines to manufacture hats.
He’d demonstrate the stitches and the paste
they duplicated by the dozens
for hats he dreamed of while he slept,
and drew on scraps of paper.
Hatter to aspiring ladies
of Queens and Brooklyn,
he made pill-boxes that perched
on stylish hair: pageboy, one side,
the other, flip like Jackie’s.
Lady Bird scorned hats,
rendered his art useless,
his pockets empty.
But in the early days,
a triumph of invention:
dangling baubles on cloches,
dipped brims, Lana Turner style,
sexy over one eye,
turbans run amok with ersatz gems.
My father’s palette
swirled with glass beads,
silk swatches,
felt, buttons, ribbons.
Notions, he called them.
For mother he’d bring satin-lined
round boxes packed with hats
she’d fasten to her head
with gleaming rhinestone pins.
For me, dad filled a cardboard carton
with scraps I built into worlds,
portals of jewels and fabric flowers
spread on the green carpet floor
and swept back into the box at day’s end
like sand paintings.
He disappeared, as they did.
But first he sewed for me
with all his notions,
a satin bridal cap,
a long white sequined veil,
a matching purse of faille and lace
with rows of perfect pearls.
Because the world is gone
Because the pebble rain stops falling
and landscapes burn—
Because the air might disappear.
What if the geese had no home to return to
what then
what now
what is left for us to imagine when
we have made this imagined reality
unimaginable made it
what it is
Still wet, we rise on wobbly legs
as the world births itself in increments,
violence and grace hovering above
our cribs like mobiles. Unmarred,
we watch the glow of animals and stars
jostle and sway—
each dangling wire a shiny
tentacle of flame.
We reach for what leans close.
The power to choose leaves
as what we grasp seizes us,
fires into our new clay.
We burst into the future
that holds the sculpted imprint
of the tools that form
our lives to fit the mold
of what we have been told.
In my first brown backyard when I was maybe six,
grandma in her best work shmata,
bloody stained apron hung loose at her waist, would sit
knees akimbo to create a cradle for her pet fowl.
With hands that held the scrapes and bumps of seven kids
and scars of her escape, she plucked one
of her chickens once she’d rung his neck, after she chopped
the creature’s feckless head. On Friday afternoons
she cooked the severed feet and head for Sorrel Soup.
She pulled the feathers clean, her fingers
like machines until all that stayed stuck to its skin
were nubs, like dad’s first growth of beard.
Then, from a dirty porcelain box hung
on the kitchen wall, I’d bring her three long matches.
She scratched them on her scuffed black
lace-up shoe and singed those stubborn
stubbles until her brownstone house on Rodney Street
rang out its poultry scented reek of acrid supper
before it ever reached the stove.
He was about to show at MoMA,
when they changed their minds
and said, Take those back.
You aren’t the one,
it was the other one of you
that made a difference,
the one that painted red and purple triangles.
But he’d moved on to small interdicted circles
unlocked with keys that opened
all the sticky figs he had eschewed
inside his fragrant brushes,
not what once he made,
but new blue circles.
Cut down by caprice, he mourned his almost
fame, pierced his paintings,
brushed ashes into slashed canvas.
Some sonofabitch from Georgia
painted a sequence that twitched between rectangles
and toilet paper rolls. A tour de force, the critics cried.
MoMA gave him three big rooms.
The artist in his hole dug further.
Now then, he thought, I’ll hang myself
from a gargoyle at the church’s eaves
around the corner from the museum.
And did. And had
his show, performance art,
hanging with the rest of them.