Mother taught me Poetry in Actions

if we were still communicating

I'd tell you

about the house we bought

on the corner of Davis & Walnut

a block or two from Reed and Pearl

(small-world n'est-ce pas?!)

...and how at the meeting on Thursday

i cracked to our Superiors on South Street

who said, whatever I thought of myself,

They Recognized my Efforts...

But we are silent, and bite a dry tongue.

My mom gave me to understand,

something about the bottle, unnursed--

She didn't drink.

Or at least we never caught her.

I think it quixotic,

and as such metaphoric,

the way she collected liquid

on a shelf, and left it

for us all to puzzle

at the way, the layaway

How things are aged, without decay

in a wooden or metal barrel

(powder in the keg)

for a drunkenness

total and submersive

and achieved like a plug,

a stopper as much by sighting

as by sniffing the cork,

of an argument

many decades old.