Mid-Century in Sepia
and Willful Unknowing

After 1946, a room for eating bread,
skin on chocolate pudding, fibers of dark meat.

A knock upon the door—bibelots, shellacked wood:
you see things lean uneasily.

               Cats’ eye marbles on the rug
filmy dresses, woolen suits. A knife fight of bare words.

Inside the afternoon falling out of time
we were coevals under the blue circumstance.

I didn’t want shielding, just warm wax in the palms.
My father said what has it got to do with you?

               I begin to answer
by polishing table dust in slow, compassionate arcs

my soft-spoken slide into invisibility
               the precarious child.

There is a witch in the Black Forest
embroidering fate upon flesh, I excel at nightmares,

               Hansel and Gretel.
I am stepping in their tracks while my brother plays

with trains that pass through costive fields
implanted with miniature trees and unexploded shells

.
He is the saner child. I’m sent out to breathe the air,
cannot bring my book or knitting block.

               An emerald snake, a toad.
In the room, they go on eating torn loaves dipped in salt.

​