TO MY COLLEGE ROOMMATE
Remember my schedules,
color coded, fixing x—
number of hours to draft
this paper, read that
assigned text,
solve those problem sets,
even minutes to spend at breakfast?
Remember how I never, once,
carried out one of those
elaborate concoctions for more
than half a day, yet crafted them,
all through college? (Or,
maybe I kept that secret, embarrassed
by my lack of self-enforcement.)
Remember dancing
to Joan Armatrading …
“Hey, when I get it right,
will you tell me, please?”, spinning
and jumping around our room, inventing
our friendship? Hey, when I get it right,
will you tell me, please?
Remember we danced and sang
daily, crammed like maniacs
during exams, cried telling our pasts,
bought one Plato and shared,
ran off our known map
into the mysterious blank,
but made it back before dark?
Remember our choosing to room
together, on the fly, and proving
doubters stupid with our synchrony?
Choosing, next, knowingly?
Then, remember, you
followed me, for grad school,
to Bloomington?
Remember, you’ve written nothing,
for thirty years—never phoned,
though moved across an ocean and a sea,
as if none of us outside your sect
existed, mattered or ever were—
defected? That’s how I see it. Notice,
the present tense. Do you sense
how wrong I am; how correct
your choices, decreed, circumspect,
while I still mess
with Wednesday,
inking in impossibilities
as if
everything will fit?
HUMMING
the daughter hears
her mother harp
about each hummingbird
hovering
haze-winged
at her cherry red
plastic feeder (hanging
from lopped plum branch)
and hopes this is no forecast
of her future
unfurling
before her eyes
because her mother
reminds her wholly too much
of her hazy-brained grandmother
every day
beholding
and holding forth on
the feathered hosts
hurrying in to the feeders
hung by her uncle
at her grandmother’s
bedroom window
so from her comfy chair
the ninety-year-old
may have what a hazy brain
can harbor
movement beauty hue
and while every hummingbirds'
visit within their fence astonishes
with his haze-wings
his quick drinks
his crimson breast
his needly beak
his vertical flight
his stronger resemblance
to bee than bird
none is enough
for the daughter
who hopes her mother's mind
will hold more than haze
and hover