mama's bag-of-needles circus

Do you know it was your
wicker knees that first fascinated me?
I watched you across a gathering of mutual
friends and a meal whose smell reminded me
of flour weevils, sweet potatoes, and an Indian grandmother.
I've kept that a secret through some
heavy temptations; even through you
telling me you were first enthralled with how
I looked like a lady at a masquerade ball,
in purple, and how I
smelled like black pepper.
Little and loverish, while the cedar-split fences
tilted and decayed, we grew smaller and more into each other
until we were truly unhealthy and had to be
bathed in lukewarm salt-water for months to be cured.

We live in a world of high standards, my dear,
set up along the classroom windowsills like
pots of paints and pots of clay and pots of
old rubber. And pots of pills.
And in the pots of pills, there are severe little
round grandfathers like the one who
widowed me
for liking his grape-wine eyes once,
and I've been grateful to my mother ever since
that I never had to see you old.
I imagine you're still that boy I knew at twenty,
feeding me Ritz crackers on the
back stairs while I
pluck with wondering fingers
at the black maze of your beard.

Sometimes in winter
my grandchildren ask me to tell them our story,
and I always begin, “There once was a boy
called Edmund Clapham,” so that if they eventually
think to look for you, they'll find only some stranger.
And when the house is lonely at night, I imagine
that Edmund Clapham is a magician my grandchildren
will find who will send me back in time. I'll be twenty
with my rope-braid of auburn down my back
wearing that lemon-green dress I used to have that
made you think of walking spring.

Foolish fantasies, but I'm almost seventy now,
and I have to bathe my feet in salt-water most nights,
excuse me.