For Ruth With Tea

I am addicted to sweet things and sad stories

blurry pages and lemon cookies

artificially flavored

tasting like conspiracy

and summer conversation in her tangled upstairs

garden

tendrils of plants and dark

luminous oil paintings

She turned them all against the wall --Eve strangled by the tree of knowledge

Faery queens with porcelain faces

and alien grabbing fingers

I remember the taste of lemon meringue pie ice cream in her humid kitchen artificially flavored

as these cookies that so sensually flake and

melt on my tongue

reading Alice Hoffman and thinking of a boy

and the woods

and a green place where I am dreaming the taste of spring candy

on my lips

lust and rain and innocence

I should be the painter --turn their faces to the walls

so they can't stare at me hungry and unfinished

I remember the last night I saw her wearing a long bright blazer

magenta roses smiling

praising her new medication

I wanted to be happy for her but I missed the livid colors of her rage

those dark confessional

claustrophobic moments listening to her voice as she read me the novel she wrote for her children

so they would know who she had been before they were born

Our heads bent over teacups and ice cream

one dark and one white

though she would mock me if I mentioned Taoism and balance

she would mock me and keep me honest ranting

--Mary Oliver is a millionare and not a mystic

all flavors are artificial

where is nature in this world governed by pavement and chain link fences

nature is nowhere except a metaphor to sell poetry

but the Big Dig so huge and all around her was real and and I told her only a true pantheist would see God in that monster machinery

and I want to tell her I still taste yellow in my dreams

I still smell the sun's honey on my fingers

in every woods I walk in

and someday I'll be as brave and bold as she was

till then there are these lemon cookies from the dollar store

these sad dreamy New England romance novels

these windows full of tea and conspiracy

these tepid wisdoms steeped in bitter days