Winter Amnesties

Spry Declensions

64 Spry Declensions She was always one to take up last things first, sorbets before the Buffalo wings and the wedding soup. And the hats! Some days she would wander in like an alien life-force, expelled from the planet Xerk for conduct unbecoming a cranium. And though her hands pumped like greased pistons on the spinet keys, firing a song from zero to sixty with the pedal down, her words were hit and run, a warble of wobbly syllables, twelve bent bars that began Home, home and deranged. Surprising, then, how the poems piled up, shoeboxes topped with tankas, mislaid pantoumes, sonnets on Ping-Pong, odes to oatmeal and disgrace— bard of the pressed posy and the barefaced rhyme! And there were other wonders that buttoned her against the cold stare of the crowd: she could knock down a slug of hardjack with no tremor in the cup; she was partial to the hick blue swoons of Patsy Cline; her spry stride would not allow the tall woman’s apologetic stoop. And when her breath came shallow, the spark suspended, the starch eased out, 65 hour on blind hour she would sit behind the avant-gothic sway of the drapes, yearlong in a limbo of winter, saying At my time of life, the time of day no longer matters, it’s always dark and short. ...