My Girls

If it had four good walls for her girls
she might settle for a sand house on the beach.
One good door with a knob, a pot and a pan in a drawer—yeah!
she'd settle
for an incoming tide for a floor, mudcakes on the stove sticks to eat them. She'll be a lady, tending green roses. Her girls will play in the black yard, heaping wet sand all over their bodies like icing like she did when she was a girl, and a man said she looked good enough to eat, asked her to break him off a piece of that.

She's pulling cutty-grass
out of the claw bath
on her knees in her nightie. Her broken feet
poke out behind. She cracks her jaw.
Her bones! They're cellophane,
but it's OK, she's got tablets for them.

In the afternoon her girls call in
just when she's patting the dirt down like a dog,
hunting for bullseyes inside a tomato plant
playing the tendrils on the vine
but no tune. They call in, then they're gone.
'Girls?' she calls, 'where are my girls?'
and they come back to her like proud knights,
leading Joe the collie
who went under the house once and never came out until now.
She can't believe him! She holds his sweet face
and kisses his eyes to close them.