Scraping Plates
Published in Musomania (Bryn Mawr & Haverford Colleges), 1994
Scraping Plates (1994)
This is love -
common as a sink
full of soap and water,
warm and rubbery,
soiled and lovely,
awful and diminishing.
This is all that has
happened between us-
trapped in the forever
shallow end,
continuously waiting for
the plug to be pulled,
innocently admitting a
tendency to run
away as quickly as
It came.
Come in come in
it calls to
weak hands which
obey each time.
Opposed twins,
reaching for the
same things,
simultaneously they
recall the truths:
the blue of two fixed eyes
the sorrow of second best,
the sincerity of sadness
all over again.
If words do not work,
sensations will.
A squeeze of a sponge
soaked with these waters,
a trickle of pitiful heat
across a stiff back,
all that is needed to
swallow the shiver which
startles straight through
This water is mine, I swear,
contained in square, submerged
in countertop.
I appear in the clear left over
when suds separate.
I indulge in the elusive
putrid and vibrant of bubbles,
colors which stain memory.
With my hands in the thick
of such love I could forget
the huge of the house around
me, the fact that water always
washes somewhere, and warmth
inevitably fades to cool.
I am fixed to this spot.
I am a creature with two
good legs and garden hoses of
veins and intestines all my own.
I am fixed.
This is
love
this flood,
winding its way
around fingers,
threatening circulation.
This is all that has
happened between us,
this steam rising to face like
fever, addictive
and agonizing,
consistent in its
promise to
break.
