– 57 –

Dresses of the World

Dresses know the rules:
cover things up with a tender mouth,
the best ones sighing as if
nothing's inside, falling, shucked

rudely from the green, ugly stem.
In a dress I said no to the house
planted on a mudslide, fate
made sure by the bugs

scything themselves in the brown
grass, hardly ever wrong
about rain. The dress and I
ran out to the cat, gauzed white

by our kid's sobs. A dress
held that same boy as he
learned the licit poses of grief:
in its lap, he went, bent

at the waist, from Hands
Outstretched to Collapse.
A dress that bit you in half.
And what am I? At best,

three-quarter sleeves, suspended
satin, torn and browning, too small.
And what do I mean by the world?
Another waist to choke on. Failure

to fall, when falling is the law.

– 58 –

Neighbours

Three people were my friends that year:
the sun-brown woman, looking for work
in the dirt, the pale blonde, and,

always following, the boy. The brown
one kept dogs, like every human woman,
one always nearly dead at her feet. Her face

hung final above the thin grass of that
breeding place, her leg swung from a splintering
table like a skein of sand. Of the blonde,

all that can be said is the slur of parties
that she followed or followed her,
what remained distinct was the choppy

ends of her pale, sleek hair. She turned
and smoked among so many hands, spinning
and spun, soft, expendable platinum. I was

of course, lonely: is that already clear? For this
there was the boy, who I led through the flimsy
halls of our housing, the giant bathrooms,

what was called the woods, covered in kissing
bottles and butts, the foot of each fine dry tree run
to brown dust. He needed very little to follow,

an odd sweet, or a piece of one, but as it went on,
I must dissolve and dissolve him, or he'd turn
toward the filthy buildings we lived in,

– 59 –

the windows glancing back a kind of white
fire, and inside the sand raining down, covering
everything in me of note.

The Dolls Leave Home

Two dolls took a short toy train ride
and disappeared. They had a picnic,
perfect small eggs and wine, left
in the seat beside them. They had

an event to attend, and a small china
baby, shiny copper hair; easy to see
among the cushions of the couch,
or behind it, in a deep plush

of dust. They had everything
in their house, a heavy hinged roof,
three white walls, and nothing slipped
down behind the clumsy, lovely workings

of its furniture. In fact, they were replicas
of my sister and myself, bought to look
just like us, and act like us—but we
would never disappear. We would have

turned up, stiff and resistant as our china
joints would allow. We would have
felt for you, our owners, our victims
of that heavy, terrible regret in losing

something defenceless: time to go
to the party and only one tiny
mirror left in the house.