SWEPT The obligatory conversation twice a week: the kids are fine, their grades are good, the plumber's here, but she misunderstood because her hearing aid was off. You slice through crumbs and sweep, in your bare feet, then run them out the kitchen door: Two birds, one stone; you'll finish something while you're on the phone— something mindless, something needing done. The arguments were old, like grapes they'd rolled beneath the stove and out of reach. You stepped around the sticky spots. You softly beat the rugs. You missed the cheddar, gray with mold, and almost dropped the telephone. You swept, she died. Now you wear slippers on your feet. FROST They gave her Valium to slow his leaving and like September's timid frost, they said it was to ease the tights strings of her grieving— not bear her loss or stop her from day-dreaming he'd come around, prepare her tulip bed. They gave her Valium to slow his leaving and she considered it, to calm her breathing while she buried bulbs, all they'd left unsaid would ease the tight strings of her grieving until the thought occurred, it would be pleasing to eat the sugar corn he'd hoarded. Instead, they gave her Valium to slow his leaving and she smiled, purged his garlic while conceiving ways to build her long-denied garden shed and ease the tight strings of her grieving. She eyed his kale, won't emulate his cheating sweetness by denying frost. Yes . . . he's dead. They gave her Valium to slow his leaving, but she had eased the tight strings of her grieving.
A BRIEF NEW ENGLAND HISTORY OF DESKS AND VIEWS When her father, Bronson, built Louisa May a desk between two windows in her room, she faced the wall to write, then blazed away to force those hot-house Marches into bloom. And Hawthorne, who would rather stand than sit, designed a tower room at Wayside. Enthused but bothered by its bleakness, he couldn't commit to work; the standing desk was seldom used. Then Emily: she couldn't have kept a lamp and both her elbows on her desk and write. When funerals passed in view, she would decamp and seal her hymns in drawers, buried from sight. A stream of tractor-trailers screens my view. The ironing-board-as-desk makes its debut.