Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

Too late you learned to care that clean places

make people want to need you, want to need

to be sitting easy within little distraction: ants

in the kitchen on the stove where the pilot

light is plugged and hissing some

as the jets sputter and tick

and the knob stays at a perpetual leeward

lean.  The last thing it lit was her cigarette

and the gas wafted and could’ve

killed everyone in the house but

you opened the windows to get clean

air in. 

I want to come home and make it

right for you, to fight your quiet despair

with as simple a bottle as Windex and a box

of your favorite wine, maybe a six pack of

Narragansett.  These days you spend

too much time rubbing your permanently damaged

hand, the spot where the lost last finger

once,

when it was first taken off completely, unthreaded

itself like a sighing corset that's always been 

too tight, lungs, stomach, 

squished into the hourglass women were

taught was beautiful.  Talk about your heart

being in your throat.  Of course I’m imagining

that, and shifting my point of view, but that's easy
and it’s your left hand and you worked

the rest of your life lacing up your boots

against the dark morning, unmooring

your boat after baiting 99

plus one more baitbags, all

before the sun comes across the table to ill-

uminate like a monstrance  on all the 

grocery flyers and receipts for cottage

cheese, razors, a ham shoulder, a six pack

of Gatorade the ear nose and throat doctor

told you to drink instead of booze, after you

had your esophagus stretched for the umpteenth

time.  And those coupons, they’re under

the sun that’s not come up yet too, but you

don’t bother to cut out any like my mother

did and who used to put them in her wallet

like money, like clean, clean money, just

off the bankroll.  I want to write a poem

so beautiful and clean it will hurt you

quietly, it will feel like the soft of skin

itched and rubbed, brushed off, ignored

like everything else in your house: your guns,

your broken garden hose on the coffee

table, your Christmas

cactus that's been the the color of the end

of autumn since God knows

when, just as the first real snow is coming

to cover it all.  I want to be home

before snow falls abundantly and for months

to come.  But I'll settle

like I have for years, on one Thanksgiving

like we had in the old days when there was plenty

to go around and everyone home

to eat it.