THE MILKSOP

The milkman whistles on Tuesdays and Fridays

Happy in his work delivering Vitamin D

Homogenized Pasteurized cream and milk

To our insulated front-porch box provided

Free by the company. I never touch the stuff,

Unless, in bed to go to sleep, my mind awhirl

From too much late coffee or the onset

Of psychosis, I go downstairs to the kitchen

And stir up a scalded milk-white brew, rich

With butter, laced with salt, and gulp

My way back to a mindless comfort,

A trick I learned from my mother

Who wakes in her nights in anguish more than I.

THE ESTATE

Word will come, at last, one of these days,

That my mother is dead. A long distance voice

Will say your mother is dead. Right there

By the phone, I will take it like a Man --

No tears, no hysterics -- but a Boy will pack

A suitcase and be on the next plane home.

He will sit, in a window seat, near the controls,

Just behind the cockpit, and, scanning the stars,

Will imagine, once again, the lamentable return

From the grave-site -- his older sister and he

Dividing the furniture both grew up with:

The velvet sofa, the hand-painted fruit plates --

They go round and around the rooms until

Sideboard, highboy, and breakfast bench -- all

Fall to the children, as their own, to keep.

Flying back, the next night, among the stars

He will see, up there, Orion's glittering belt

And sword and Cassiopeia's beautiful chair.

ALMA MATER

As I walk. march-step, down the aisles of the universe

At my 25th reunion, noting who is bald, who fat,

Whose dark circles betray multiple bouts of psychosis,

Who has multiple sclerosis, or has lost a limb,

I reach the altar where my mother stands in flame-

Crimson Harvard doctor's gown holding a sun-burst monstrance.

I refuse the chalice. And swear on my three books of poems

To create, between fifty and sixty, my own myth

Of a god, my own myth of a goddess.

That's all, folks.