African Violets
hot release little square of flesh on sofa midday cloud what they wouldn’t give for a real canvas stretched over a wooden frame fingerprints on the window pane and one long look and release little shoe little purple violet whatever next? to pop up between the velvet leaves like that woman and her word vellum in that poem where she was locked in a toilet or maybe she was just in it but listening in to grandmother words some old heartbreaking skin inside a maple wood chest with a tiny booklet full of pinkish sheets of powdered paper
(I look to the shelf where the answers are hidden but all I see is that need for sorting, sifting. That’s what I need: a good filter, preferably made of thin metal, like a laced silver sweet dish)
where the posters were pasted onto the walls was where we ate crepes and you walked in and stood between the windowpanes and we went to bed on opposite sides of the room laughing with crying for intervals in that room with all its carefully chosen lamps and picture frames and all of them so whitish and brand new and you didn’t know what to say when I cried and that’s how it’s always been and only the little yellow spotted face of the African violet in the bathroom understood the way the street tapered to the blue wrought iron and how the stairs went up up up and even past my front door and up again and there on that little square of tiles only there where the rooftops stayed up late and bats were the same as swallows and it was so dark you couldn’t tell
