Look at This
Two wild pears from a tree near the train tracks, on a windowsill facing ten p.m. neighborhood backyards. Each would fit in one palm.
Almost everything else lies on one table.
A round pill box, brewpub restaurant coaster pasted to the lid, blue behind a red heart.
My wife’s glasses: black bows, thin gold frame, folded.
Tabby-cat head painted above a man’s torso in green jacket, ruffled sleeve, staring wide, pointing a claw toward me, mouth open to all its teeth. My birthday card, from her.
Four Tibetan prayer flags tied in a packet, leaning against the black ring of a chrome-bodied Planet Saturn table lamp.
Silver salt and pepper shakers bought near the birth of the 20th century. Unpolished, dull, from my wife’s maternal grandmother.
British first-day postal sheet in a frame marbled like ostrich feathers: four stamps with Edward Lear cartoon drawings.
Square ceramic tile – Calle Luna – lettered black on white like the street signs of San Juan. Our only Puerto Rico souvenir aside from a pencil.
The Saturn lamp’s gray shade sprinkled with adhesive silver stars, pinned with a cloth dragonfly. The stars came with the shade, from the old house.
Edward Lear verses, one per stamp, for his 1) Owl and Pussycat, 2) woman with huge-brimmed hat flocked by birds, 3) own body, globular, 4) monstrous alphabet-book cat (C).
HCD, her grandmother’s silver-engraved initials, dense like Edwardian wildstyle.
Stained glass blue eye, almond-shaped, lashes like maple stick candy, hung on the wall above the pill box, made in Turkey.
Saturn lamp, nineteen-thirties modern, from my late mother-in-law’s deceased childhood friend. We read by its light in the kitchen before ending each day, as in a few minutes from now.
Table space where her glasses had been but aren’t now.
Gift silver pendant with image under glass of the moon on the day, hour, place she and I met, Boston, July 5, 12 noon, 1988.
(Mr. Lear) And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon.
David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations, and have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, Reed Magazine, About Place Journal, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, SurVision, Vincent Brothers Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among other journals. His poems “Interview” and “And You” were included in an issue of Magma (UK) focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He is a member of Boston’s Jamaica Pond Poets.
The Disappointed Housewife 