Three Poems

M Is for Mouse

In a dark drawer he shreds the bristlesof a basting brush,gleaning oil from the boar’s hair,

then rears, snout stainedby the bouillon cube he despoiled.His whiskers twitch, he listens …

No, he is alone. The sportscastersare courtsidecollaborating on a bedtime story.

Play by play threaded with color,action with consequence —the man of the house,

permitted to stay up, drifted offto that comfortingsuspense. The wife braces

in her blanket of white noise.Her dreams,if remembered, will surprise

then confirm. The daughter’s legs lengtheninexorablylike the mouse’s incisors

that crumbled the golden cube —nownownownownowgoes his creature heart. And now and now and now

go the hearts upstairs, each onebigger than a mouse.Each heart has four rooms

and each room has a doorA mother’s drawer holds an heirloom ring,a lock of hair, and a box of teeth.

A mouse shreds, a family sleeps,a hand slipsa coin beneath a pillow.

She can’t be real, the girl thinks,a fairywinging through the night

with a bag of teeth.(The alternative, though, she findsno less difficult to imagine.)

The light assembles, the birdsdiscuss,the coin is there,

the mouse is gone.

G Is for Genius

A single bite from the center of each of six lamb chopswas Einstein’s dinner.

He did not like fat.Or waste.

He gave the remainders to his sister, his daughter,his lover …

His lover’s husband was, like Einstein, a gentle man.A sculptor, Russian, he worked

on West 8th, though, like Einstein, livedin the immensity of the cosmos.

He made swan-shaped chairs, dwarvestaking tea, wooden boxes with wooden keys,

saints and girls and nudes. A child full of wonder,recalled his model. A saint

seeing the macrocosm in every tiny piece of life. While she poseda mouse stood on her shoe.

For Einstein’s lover’s husband fed them.He fed the cockroaches, too. He set bowls of sugar

on tables in the shapes of woodland creatures.Thirty-odd mice, innumerable cockroaches

in a West Village studio. Fortunately for the neighborsEinstein’s lover’s husband had a wife.

In Russian, she sent her husband to the park;in English, she spoke to the exterminators.

She spoke five languages, or seven.At any rate, a lot.

Einstein wrote to her in German:Ich wusch mir alleine den Kopf — I washed my head

by myself. But not, he wrote, with the greatest success;I am not as careful as you are.

Indeed: she brought a boiled chicken to Penn Station.Einstein’s train arrived at noon. He might be hungry

and he did not like sandwichesor restaurants. She was most careful

that he not be bothered — in the garden, for example.Geniuses like gardens. There they can

solve problems or feed the birds.

P Is for Permission

a cento