Patricia Goedicke

Luggage first, the lining of his suit jacket dangling
As always, just when you’d given up hope
Nimbly he backs out of the taxi

Eyes nervously extending, like brave crabs
Everywhere at once, keeping track of his papers
He pilots himself into the home berth

Like a small tug in a cloud of seagulls
Worries flutter around him so thick

The way calcium grows

all by itself into bone, microscopic
fraction attaches itself to fraction

or clouds crystallize, or blizzards congeal into hard
ice on aluminum wings,

even the astronauts’ bodysuits can’t cover up
the sheer strangeness of it, the extraordinary being-here

or anywhere, the skin of the plane could easily peel back

Or will we be lost forever?

In the silence of the last breath
Not taken

The blue sweep of your arm like a dancer
Clowning, in wrinkled pajamas,

Across the sky the abrupt
Brief zigzag of a jay...

All night the whiteness

Whenever I see two women
crowned, constellated friends

it is as if three birch trees wept together
in a field by a constant spring.

The third woman isn’t there

exactly, but just before them a flame
bursts out, then disappears

in a blurred, electric shining

Is dead serious about this one, having rehearsed it for two weeks
they bring it right into the Odd Fellows Meeting Hall.
Riding the backs of the Trojan Women,
In Euripides’ great wake they are swept up,

But the women of the chorus, in black stockings and kerchiefs,
Stand up bravely to it, shawled arms thrash
In a foam of hysterical voices shrieking,
Seaweed on the wet flanks of a whale,

I have arrived here after taking many steps
Over the kitchen floors of friends and through their lives.

The dun-colored hills have been good to me
And the gold rivers.

I have loved chrysantheumums, and children:
I have been grandmother to some.

In one pocket I have hidden chocolates from you
And knives.

You could pick it up by the loose flap of a roof
and all the houses would come up together
in the same pattern attached, inseparable

white cubes, olive trees, flowers
dangling from your hand
a few donkey hooves might stick out

flailing the air for balance,
but the old women would cling like sea urchins