The House on Tator Hill
All night the wind strummed the shingles,
while I slept with my jaw like a fist.
She wanted sex first thing in the morning
to the rhythm of the percolator’s clicks.
Her aunt had a real Chagall hanging over the piano.
She stocked the freezer with Grey Goose, then traveled for months.
We claimed the guest room, the basement, the patio.
We warmed the Veuve on our tongues.
I watched it snow through the window in the spare room
that winter––little nobody’s window, hardly-used, hardly-seen––
and felt the ecstatic twinge of a poem.
Then April lent March a mouthful of green:
two chocolate meringues and those daffodils, double-busted;
all the times I tripped across the overlapping rugs.
She melted butter in pans while the garden trellis rusted.
Every now and again, my knees bled in the tub.
The pond smelled sour even after we smoked pot
and a doe pranced down and sipped from its edge.
I didn’t belong in that house, or in any of its portraits,
but we tried to make a home of its four-poster bed.
