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Poems from Naked Magic
The Insect War
All day I battled ants, their tiny
scrambling legs,
their plated armor crunching under my
thumb,
their endlessness. A queen had moved
inside
our fridge, a terrorist whose cells
replicated
in secret below the clean white
surfaces.
We didn’t know the intimate electric
works inside
were a swarm of ant activity, wires
alive
with minute movement, the hidden nest,
until the first small scouts emerged
upon the tundra of the freezer,
Antarctic explorers dark against the
white
continent of frost, their hard cold
bodies discovered
stuck to mountains of frozen peas and
potstickers,
so close to paradise. The first ones
were a sign
of things to come. In wagon trains and
lemming hordes
they crawled through ducts and under
rubber seals
and came to die in thousands against the
food, a fur
of bodies frozen to the plastic barriers
that kept them out.
And so I vacuumed up the corpses,
plugged the holes
as best I could with caulk and put out
poison
they refused to eat, and still they
found new ways
to break into the treasure box and die.
And now in bed I’m antsy, knowing
they’re still crawling
out of crevices to perish by my
perishables,
and so I scratch my head and slap my
face and drift away
at last watching them crawl down my lids
like teeny herds
of sheep and take residence inside my
head,
their slender legs, their eating mouths,
their endlessness.
The Gifts
For her birthday I bought eight small
gifts,
a silver pen with rubber grip, a silver
hair clip,
a silver zippo lighter on which I had
engraved
Ayame is a poem. A glass and
silver box within which
were seven smaller glass and silver
boxes.
A lavender and olive oil soap bar, a
lavendar mist,
a lavender and aloe hand lotion. And
other gifts,
all lavender and silver, each in its own
small box, wrapped in hand-made paper,
with ribbons, bows, and loving notes.
And what made it better was that it all
cost too much
and we were much too poor, so how she’d
love me more
when I pulled out each new gift we
couldn’t afford.
I gave her the soap when she woke up,
the lotion over coffee, and saved the
rest for other meals,
for with the cake, and on the dance
floor, and before bed.
And right before we left to meet our
friends
she called out, “Take the garbage,”
which I did,
the five white bags laid by the door,
and walked them to the dumpster, then
went back
to get our bags. And now you know the
rest.
Of course I’d thrown the presents out,
pearls
for the swine, toddlers with the
bathwater,
and of course, when I ran out minutes
later
the garbage truck had just left with all
the presents
nestled in its belly. And we jumped into
the car
and raced around the neighborhood until
we found
the truck, and I leapt out and convinced
the nice
garbage men to let me climb into that
underworld
in my dress shoes and pants and dig.
Inside the truck, up to my knees in
muck,
while the garbage men looked on and lent
me gloves
and their advice, I lifted stinking
paper bags,
newspapers and broken toys, and tossed
them
in a whirl of flies and anger for an
hour,
until, exhausted, I sat down in the
garbage
and breathed it in, the smell of my own
failure.
And now each time I pass the dumpster I
say Oh,
and look inside, as if the cosmos might
take pity
and the gifts appear, as if the cosmos
practiced
recycling, and why not? —Adam made from
clay
and Eve from bone, Lazarus brought back
from death,
the Jewish rabbi dead and then reborn,
stranger things have happened, or so
they say.
But no, they don’t come back. And though
my wife
forgave me the second I climbed down the
ladder
into that world of trash, it took me
longer to accept.
At first I took some comfort in the
notion of the presents waiting
in their boxes underground for some
future exhumation.
But later I gave up on that illusion,
gave in
and knew that though they went astray,
the nature
of the gifts is that they’re given, and
given away.
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