Cathy

"I always moved with my people, even when they was headed down, or when things for us looked up, we was like a river of honey, flowing slow and steady around evil just tryin to stay."


Rich girl says she hates cooking, won't try,
But comes sweet and simple into my kitchen
And offers to help in this lonely kind of way.
I set her to chopping vegetables.
My two, they are in the other room, little sparrows
Hopping from couch cushion to couch cushion
And word to word, trading vocabulary like her kids trade candy,
Identifying the bright, the attractive, the scent of it,
Hoarding up today's additions: clippers! One shouts,
Kayak! Is the rejoinder.

I set her at the kitchen table with a plate and a knife
And a pile of carrots, peppers, onions.
Half an hour it took me to pick them all out,
Since the pantry gets mostly dry goods anyways and the produce usually comes musty,
Limp with days under the cosmetic mist of the rich people market.
She don't notice; she don't know. I don't mind it that way.

My two, their dreams are big, and I want them to tell her.
She listens with big blue eyes while little pink moths form complex vowel sounds:
Physicist, zoologist, rodeo, opera.
They have never been to a rodeo, or the opera, or a science center, or a zoo, but
They have that kid understanding of what they are missing-
And that they cannot ask why we have never been.
She brought custard to share, and when they ask her how eggs make such a thing,
She leans into them, mimes cracking an egg, her voice rising and falling.
I don't know why she's here but I don't mind, I don't mind.