She who wields you
gets a grip on her task
and bears down to change
one thing into another,
like most everything used
in the kitchen except for
the plates, and even they hold
what will be turned to
smudges and scraps. The fork
looks at you and says, I used to
do your job from scratch,
back in the day, and adds
Thank goodness you took over.
You aren’t the kind
that faces down the eggs
or potatoes with a sharp
mesh of empty squares
like graph paper, but you sport
the single wavy line
of a graph’s up and down
findings themselves: the rise
and fall of lilac blooms
over four years, tide heights
Tuesday, optimism and
pessimism as a parent
any given day, heartbeat,
success rates and relapse.
You model the waves
in which we tumble, day
over day, and what we can
expect at the end, the
breaking down. We hold
someone, we let them
go. You are a little time
machine on a pegboard
hook, without tick or tock.
We provide the hands;
someone asks for seconds
and then the meal
is cleared away.