Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

A Mother’s Hell

The Widow Jacklitch

All night, all night, the cat wants out again.

I’ve locked her in the kitchen where she tears

From wall to wall. Her bullet head leaves marks;

She swings from tablecloths, dislodges pots.

When Rudy was alive the cat was all

You ever could have wanted in a child, it sat so still

And diligently sucked its whiskers clean. I cram

A doily in my mouth to still the scream.

All night the sweethearts dandle in the weeds.

It’s terrible, the little bleats they make

Outside my window. Girls not out of braids

Walk by. I see their fingers hike their skirts

Way up their legs. I say it’s dirt.

The cat’s got rubbage on her brain

As well. She backs on anything that’s stiff.

I try to keep the pencils out of reach.

That Kröger widow practiced what she’d preach

A mile a minute. If she was a cat

I’d drown her in a tub of boiling fat

And nail her up like suet, out in back

Where birds fly down to take their chance.

I don’t like things with beaks. I don’t

like anything that makes a beating sound.

Beat, beat, all night they hammered at the truck

With bats. But he had locked himself

In stubbornly as when a boy; I’d knock

Until my knuckles scabbed and bled

And blue paint scraped into the wounds. He’d laugh

Behind his door. I’d hear him pant and thrill.

A mother’s hell. But I’d feel the good blindness stalk

Us together. Son and mother world without end forever.