Poem, and: The Shower Cap

Poem

In the morning I go to wake youbut you're not sleeping, let alone hungry.I open the notebook,lead you out of your stall.But you gawk at the gate,won't bolt or eat.You could be like this for days& never die,staring up into my puffy eyeseach morning

from your safe reposeon my littered desk.Because no one really wants you,and nothing happensunless I shake you up,send you out into the worldwhere you may or may notgallop off, deserting & outliving me.

To hell with you,I'll stay at the barn,write lines in air& hours, in feed scoops & saddle repairs,and the way a thousand poundsbends around an inside leg at the slightestprovocation, & the light comes onamazing me each day with its catalogof the remainder,the welcoming nickers of the living.

The Shower Cap

For my daughter

As I unfold it now, I can smell

The musty-sweet of Grandmother's Lake Chautauqua, 1960.Churning into the bathroom mirror in my first striped two-piece,

I was all alone with her lily-scented soaps and porcelain swans   and shower capAs sailboats lazed on the water, just outside her very pink   window.

It was a plastic cap, with little colored dotsScattered over the hood, and a terribly frayed elastic,

Which, in all the world,Could only have been hers.

Though my mother hated her own mother,She chose the signature keepsake,

Then left it at the bottom of a dresser drawerFor twenty years.

Each Easter, without fail, the pot of lilies would arrive,In a delivery truck chugging up the driveway.

I never had to check the cardTo know the sender: "Love, Mother."

Some things you can never own,But only choose and guard, and then pass on,

Like grandmother's shower cap,Or the sweet, pervasive scent of lilies

Tucked between the lines of this poem.