THE MAN BESIDE ME
Brooke Horvath
does not eat, but stares
at his food like a dog
at table scraps whose
smell is strange, head
cocked, mouth tight.
The waitress passes,
coos his name, whistles
a laugh, but he just
sits there, eyes
filling up with bones.
THE DOLL
Brooke Horvath
When she was little,
my sister loved her doll
until the paint flaked
from its bad-luck eyes
and its cloth face, abraded,
bled cotton waste,
until its hair pulled loose
and its body became
a filthy sock, a beaten
stick, dirt with ears.
And she cried, my sister
did, at what love could do.
TRAVEL APPLICATION
Brooke Horvath
And what will happen in the fall
when all the healthy birds leave town
when even at the health store: nada
when here’s nowhere, and then it snows
when some low-rent nabob arrives to snow
us, whose ignorance is of such scope
even birds know more, the birds whose scope
is limited, whose news is so different
from ours—that the Good Earth
is running a sale on Scope
that supplies, they say, are limited
and ignorance, they add, is no excuse
otherwise breathy nothings, stale,
for sale, and dear at half the price
like the darling things we love to say
about the birds, that snow, this fall
PROGRAMMED CELL DEATH
Brooke Horvath
Beside the dark door, an inflammation
of zinnias, the faceless door into an obsolete
house in which a vase of zinnias stands
in an urnlike room where no one sits
beside the malodorous bed to talk to the face
above a quilt gay as a bed of late-fall flowers,
this face in its cage of a room in a house
quilted with darkness, inflamed with stink
BIRDWATCHING
Brooke Horvath
Beyond the ailanthus, beyond where
walnuts fall, she bathes her face
in light, intent upon distances.
I doze beneath a paper birch,
its shade a raft for eyes half-closed
upon the leaf-thick lake.
“Grackles!”
she sings out, pointing—“Starlings!
The something sparrow!” Common names
skipped to me like stones across water.
The sun, bright bird, rises through poplars,
over maples, she following.
“Vireo!”—like the list she keeps—“Grosbeak!”
“Hey,” I shout, “see there, where the shadows
give way to sunshine? Against that willow?”
“What?” Can’t say. Finches!
or falling leaves.
FORCING BED
Brooke Horvath
She wants the beans out early
to see them stretch, break earth, and climb
grumbles at two planned rows of radishes
which neither of us likes
soon they’ll clot the ground with white, hot roots
that will crack, spring seed, and rot
but I plant anything that does its growing underground—
potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets—
private, misshapen, dirty
taking time, not
dangling in the air from stake-held strings
* * *
She loves to see creation forming
persuasively in the humid air
swaying, green
I need to know it’s happening
in the ground beneath me
fretfully, unseen
THREE DEAD BIRDS
Brooke Horvath
Birds, my daughter says, pointing.
Eyes, mouth, feet—
touching after each word
herself.
Baby birds, I say,
as though baby birds
always lay
in a broken sprawl on the sidewalk,
as though Watts was always burning,
as though death were a lesson in diction.
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