Molly Tenenbaum

________

My New Life

I'll start it after lunch.

Maybe staring at the mountain
will encourage it,

twinkle of someone's dropped
watch in a crack.

How dewy, washed, transparent all will be then,
how musical, rilling and coursing.

And yet, all along, we were
eating buckwheat pancakes every Sunday.

I'll start at midnight, when the registers
re-set, checker on break.

I'll slip out with eggs in my pocket.

I'll start when the white-with-pink-blush peaches come in,
when the jam has foamed, when every single pot

in the kitchen crusts in the sink,
when there's not one more clean plate.

When the mail arrives, when both hands hit twelve.
Soon as the kettle boils.

After a license plate with an X in it,
a graveyard, and two fields of cows.

Exactly when a color no one's seen before
dabs straight up in the dawn.

When the Bourbon rose's cream petals,
worn as old underwear, loosen

at the hip and drop
to the summer-tired grass.