Lovely works, dilly-dally, soapy and spongey, spritzing plastic plants in plastic periwinkle pots, organizing postcards, receipts, drool, a ticker-tape Christmas tree, bent-limbed, sprung from the package onto the end-table months ago but still on display, sweeps, washes, watches them come and go, come in something of a festival mood, grandkids hauling up suitcases and antique coffee pots, sons-in-law lugging bigger items, like the dog cage, minus dog, he’s been put down, or the German rifle in the zippered bag, war trophy, a pigtailed girl told Lovely it was her grandfather’s leg in that bag, sawed off in the slipshod expeditionary clinic, who teaches little girls to say things like that?, who?, how horrible, they come and go, some sooner, some later, and when they go the grandkids go, leaving stuff for days, collected and auctioned, go, though few of them ever stop by any how, after the moving, cleansing, more and more seldom as the days go and the stories dry up and the glaucous white eyes expand into yellow, glittering black stillness between the billows, looking up at the ceiling or out into the hydrangeas when Lovely comes in to clean, those same carnival-goers parade through in their black hats and patent shoes, their Sunday best, somber, and Lovely, when they aren’t around, looks in the closets and keyed chests for war-medals, opens zippered bags to check for dancing manuals, microscopes, that leg, then, wondering if it might be alive, kept frozen?

Lovely skims, autumn-haired, trying to stand straight among the hunched Parcheesi tournament, tilting her head to look at them wizened to her level and cheering,

What Will They Do With You When You Get Old As Us? one asks, not knowing, of course, what will be done, indeed, it’s been decided, it’s been prepared all along, baking, aftermath, go spritzing again, Lovely, there’s foam ballast in the bottom of the pots for the woven metal of the fake branches, worth, disguised, breaks the monotonous lines spidering in the hallway, the floral repeating carpet, the chair guards, the armrests, the buttons every few feet for help, antiseptic, ripcord,

*

with violins and calabash boombox the park heather soft beneath trees, shorn in the swale-back fields, pine beam rotting in the old mason’s walls, white-washed octagon of a pagoda, new smelling as an attic all this, blooming and painted over, dusk sheltering under swings and bleachers, the ducks feed, race for bread, angry and amusing commotion, a softball field, a dad pitches, distantly, a minnow, choked up on the bat, elbows high, Lovely grinds the bread, grinds and grinds flat rolled worms of bread dried in the bag, last of the loaf, bread for duck-birds, a fountain, ducks surprised as they land, excited by rain from a clear sky, spat from the mouth of the mermaid, her bosom, rumpling feathers, listening for bread and competition, with violins and calabash, Lovely pees her summer dress, calls to the van,

van, van, van,

Lovely pees, Lovely stands, all the bread worms fall around her, Lovely flexes her fingers, ducks gather clucking and dipping slo-mo, the bread worms hot and sweaty, rewetted, pilled, easing into more comfortable shapes, straightening, free from the crush, pulled by crust, ducks peck, courage, the dark circle at the center of her, hot, cooling, Lovely cleans up if there is paper, but there isn’t, dabs herself, dress hem, corner of her mouth, looks away, a jetliner traces orange bitumen in the bowl of the sky, it is evening, softball, dad pitching underhand, lobbing,

violins in the still-life unprotected now, exposed, random, tweaking and plucking, unpacking from handled violin bags, tuned, she wants to listen to music, Lovely, to rehearsal in the bandstand, and the ducks, Lovely, and the nighttime coming,

*

plastic bag, big black, shorn at its edges, Nurse has got a paperback, flattened on the console, an ashtray, Lovely reaches, Nurse says Stay Back Stay Back, On The Curb Now, Stay Back, flattens the plastic, it’s been done before, Nurse punches the seatbelt knob through one side, through the other, double-ply, won’t break, There, Sit, It’s Okay, Don’t Cry, the man on the broken spine of the paperback has blue eyes, the man on the broken spine of the paperback has long brown hair and a Phoenician nose, Lovely cups her hands in her wet, cooling crotch,

zipper, leg, zipper, it’s been cut off,

rolls down the window, van slides through the evanescence, the dusting rugs on porches, tricycles, the frills of July 4th blue and bunting, sparklers and lawnchairs,

leg, leg, zipper, cut and stored,

jumped in on the other side, Nurse starts it up, the van, starts and turns a corner or two, Nurse wrinkles her nose once, Lovely farts, We’re Here, Don’t Worry About It, the gray of the curb cascades into the duller gray of asphalt with an angled shadow, a dandelion missed by the mower blades, a pop-top, beneath the gutter grating a fish, a big yellow fish with a star on its belly,

hi fish, hi

Come Along, It’s Starting To Smell, You Get To Take A Bath Now, Hear?, Did You Like The Park?

*

bubbles, mountains and fluorescent, Santa beard, white with pink skimming circles, knees through bubbles, big islands with indigenous people, parades, music high-pitched and plaintively aspirate on the beaches, pearl-divers and head-takers and lovers in the palms wearing coconut thongs,

the ducks fight back, two of them, gargantuan relics from some duck-time once when they ruled and made duck-laws about bread and sharing, an ideal ducky land, dip, sparkle through white bubbles looking innocent no we’re not sneaking up on you islanders, no we’re not, nevermind the duck devils floating on the tsunami, the painted smiles on us, feral, the one eye, a sticker, didn’t hold the wetness, drooped, looks in two directions, up and down, like everything, anti-up and anti-down, charmed to the toes mirrored in the tub plug, fat and bulging and curled knuckle pink, up to the drips waiting cold on the tub ceiling, Nurse took away the sprayer, It’s A Bath, Lovely, A Bath, Try To Make It Easy On Me Tonight, so the war between the islanders and the yellow duck gods was a quiet war, with only a minor tsunami, a cold war, sneaking, spying, sluicing economics in the transport of banana cargo, spiders, ukulele strings, Lovely, the soundless wail, Lovely opens her mouth to help them when the juggernaut lands, pecking, little person bubbles sunning on the knee beach, babies, just babies, they’re babies, you can’t be so cruel as to,

well,

Lovely’s done.

That’s A Good Sentence, Lovely! I’ve Set Your Towel Out For You. Dry Up. We’ll Make Some Popcorn.

blue-eyed Phoenician on the broken spine, Lovely tilts her head, he’s Apollo except maybe he wears a leather necklace, beaded, thrice wrapped around his wrist, and his teeth are too sharp, not Apollo, no, though the forearm is similar, scarred, yes, convincing Achilleus,

the tile chills Lovely’s feet, Nurse gets slippers, Nurse tucks Lovely into the couch, Nurse brings popcorn, Nurse reads, flips to Home Shopping Network, a jewel-case of diamonds and watches, a porcelain doll, a cutlass, Lovely sleeps,

*

mostly asparagus, it starts, and then all asparagus, seas, swaying in a sailship breeze like buffaloes on the Great Plains, blue-painted Indians, undulating, that, green, spear-tipped, blues and purples in the budded ends tickling like shadow, that’s why the pee stank, explanation, noted, asparagus, Lovely unzips her chest for a pen, writes a love poem about it down the whole length of her arm, mostly symbols, cuneiform, mostly asparagus, hills of asparagus and singular stalks swaying, ziggurats around which blonde fine baby asparagi worship, all laid flat until chilled, then instinctually, a cave-memory, the asparagi rise, trap warmth, lift the bear skin layer of Lovely an infinite cushioning away from her flesh, it’s that which saves her, the cushioning, from a silver-bullet bellied airplane, painted with Lucky and long-legged devil-horned beautiful kisses, seventeen confirmed kills, she jumps, clutching a parachute of pillows, a tooth, bombardier helmet, an industrial toaster from inside of which the molds evolve, communicate with Lovely as she plummets toward the lakes and villages, tell us a story about dying, Lovely, they say, the molds, they say: we’ve got these seventeen million iterations of mold to perform before we can speak, walk, make art and lecture, so many paths and failures, but come, tell us a myth, Lovely, about dying, so that we are prepared and can look back on it through coatings of later myth, call it truth then, that first instant of it, we’re here for you to wipe clean, Nurse has given you cleanser, scrub, dismantle, the screwdriver, unplug the cave around us, tell us a story of death,

mostly asparagus, waving, firecrackers tonight, far away over the Boston rooftops, out in the Bay streaming over the bones of sunken whale boats and ghosts of the great-grandmothers gone, clinging to their whale-boat watching nowhere, their clapboard towers, a rubberband, a pricetag, severing, it’s a machine, clods gathered carefully through the rains, mounded up on the roots, vitamins bright as orange pee, pointing to the sun, what else should you ask for?, the thrashing, communicated, sweating knots in the palpable, somewhere asparagus screams, the Boston rooftops collide, it rains, gray to make the blues brighter on the few days they come, roast beef, making love in the sands of a Japanese garden, going home full, this awaits you, thrashing, threshing, grain before dancehall, rooted before eloquent, here I am alright and alright waiting and alright with the shades of meaning I’ve come to collect, what I want to know is why, in the toaster, you’ve got a single voice?, asparagus-spore, spread your roots and conquer the table, the wine!,

mostly asparagus, but firework and rooftop and rats in the alleys watching the noise, in and out, from stoop to stoop, throwing up, partying, it’s 4^th of July!, if he’ll fall here, if he’ll fall we’ll eat his face,

mostly asparagus, Lovely wakes, the clock in the clockhall hums lonely in anticipation of the hour, striking, tension to the tick, the tock, the swing above the tile shadowed by the moon shining through side panels of glass grandfather, tock, tick, whoosh, it slips through the night, scatters bronze streamliner lipstick on the parquet, pixie sparkle from beveled door falling like Technicolor snow on the terra cotta, up the wall, climbing like vine and bowery art, magic, Lovely reads this shimmer on her hands and knees, Nurse has gone to bed, Nurse has left her book, Nurse has tucked herself away, crawls, twists over onto her back and pulls the hem of her nightdress up so she can look through the Egyptian thinness of it, grid it, sparkle, grid it, the translucent weave, halcyon, rainbow, greens like the green of a katydid eye, black between, the narthex black, ritual black, black between which diamonds mine more luster and teach us to hate, uncertainty, shame, emptiness, difference, glimpsing that concentrated accident of truth that is the sparkle, hate, hate mortal, O, escape, and Lovely naked from the waist down, scab-kneed, shod in bunny slippers, happy,

the grandfather chimes, officially night passes, heritage, time, Lovely reads the sparkle,

Krishna, Krishna, govinda hare,

Lovely might sleep again, gathered in the mahogany cold, tweed sweet the bearded few forefathers of country and plump admiring her from their oil paintings, Lovely claws at the tile, the keeper of the sound, stealthily, change, change between terra cotta and grout, snake and cat, the two hisses, faster, faster, Lovely moves her hips, tile, grout, fingernail, tile, grout, up, sidewise, back to the middle, Lovely pumps her heels on the tile, lifts herself up by her bellybutton toward the rafters, sets herself down, squeezes her shoulder blades together, bites into the Egyptian liner, dry, like pancake batter before buttermilk, old and lumpy, the bread and yeast and yearning upward, urge, it is simple here, happy,

fireworks arc, splatter, are, for a second are, and then no more, are storm and piercing, gone, where they trace toward earth blackness and smoke Lovely marks them though few others watch the debris beneath the dazzle, few watch where the dark things land, and in what tongues they speak, fallen, once the brightness objects in the sky, Chinese dragons and lettering for a teen to wrap around the shell of his love note, give it to her, surprise her in the hedges, it comes once, that chance, surprise her with the leg, the zipper, Germans took it, and bare, the rats watching, vegetables fueled by the striking rapid electrical storm, rooted, beanpod, nitrogen, tuning old radios, sending cellphone messages worldwide about a worldwide henceforth asparagus, these shards descended from the shame of the toaster, shards black and invisible, eclipsed in the moonlit beveled sparkle and refraction, you’ll see us move, know a bit of us, lit, bright for an instant, if you concentrate and open yourself, wish your anxiety to stall flat on the tile and chilly for a night, asparagus field, foreigner on the Cape, looking for an excuse to fight and stomp the edges of their smolder and dissolution,

Lovely takes the pen, zips it into her chest again, climbs the stairs, the rusted wheelchair track spiraling beside her, what was the noise it made when it made noise once?, she remembers it, says it aloud, felt and purring, felt and purring, locomotive, felt and purring, felt and purring, locomotive, plop,

*

glow stars glow moons glow rings of Saturn in the gilt thick scrollwork, baroque, red orbital pattern wallpaper, meson-tracing, trails dissolving in paisley where the particular ends, means, iron, willful, railing, white filament of curtain, transparent and pure, tugged down, billowing no more, Lovely in the sleigh bed, Lovely in the 3/16^th scale dollhouse, Lovely in the winter hothouse yesterday, empty now of plants, looked up at her room in the cornice and shelter, the seventeen chimneys, the lawnsmen nodding, Lovely, estate,

chestnut, treefort, Lovely, Go To Sleep, Nurse says, Nurse must hear it, the thumpery, the boyband Lovely has lined up around Raggedy Ann, the riding rocking horse, the naked, no, can’t hear naked, no,

whatever you want to call it, the Tao, rocking horse, god, listens to this, rocking horse asparagus, lets the big outside of you wander Lovely and ooops, don’t care about that, no, woven into it, the sparkler smoke, the falling Chinese, arcing, it plots everything in the darkness, the scatter graph, the median, what evidence do you see for this?, what evidence urges Lovely faith, grace, acceptance, dancing naked in herself,

tell us a story about death the mold says, we’ve got so far to go, so many plastic plants rooted in foam, look into the pot before you decide it grows, look before you water it,

Sleep, Lovely, Or I’m Calling The Gardener

Lovely flees to her bed, panting, never naked like this, fresh folded, sheets and cold, her nightdress puddled, white skin puddled, shed, still mottled with refractions of moonlight and chiming there in the dancehall heaving, the lung of the beast of her nighttime.