TWENTY SEVEN
You were twenty seven when you divorced.
You were twenty seven like it was no longer
a new home but an old highway,
with distance instead of walls,
destinations filling in for rooftops.
And yet home you went, empty now,
like twenty seven was a lifetime
with its CD's split down the middle,
its television chosen over its stereo,
one closet full, one empty,
and bills spread across the table,
each itching to be paid last.
You were twenty seven in the rooms,
or outside in the garden.
It was the age of the grass that needed cutting,
the windows that could wait a month.
It was raw carrots and a telephone ringing,
and you dropping one to talk into the other.
"Twenty seven here," you could have said,
"and no longer married."
You could have even taken a sharp knife
to that vegetable, cut it into twenty seven slices.
Last week it might have cucumbers.
But the time of hacking penis shapes is behind you.
Twenty seven...
it made a kind of warbling sound
in the back of your throat.
It sang along to James Taylor on the radio
but not on a CD because he took that one
along with the stereo.
Twenty seven... it's the excuse people need
for legalized burglary, for a mouth full of
soda and an eye on the dust motes on the counter top.
So now it's neither intimacy or hermit,
court musician or parrot,
subterranean grotto or restaurant non-smoking section.
it's you, just you, twenty seven of you
if you ever counted.
Your name is... it changed the once
but it feels like it never stops changing.
So you call yourself twenty seven,
figure a year of this will do.
LANDFILL
So it's more than just bodies
we dump out of our lives.
There's whatever trash can fit
into the back of the Chevy,
or even the mattress strapped to the roof,
its springs poking through
so it looks like a bed of nails.
It's not just wakes and funerals,
but green bags stuffed to bursting,
hauled out through the doors,
the back window, tossed like cabers
onto a plastic mountain.
It's asking two strangers
for help with the rusty refrigerator
or a couple of bald tires
rolled down a hill of rotting metal
like a children's game.
Every weekend, weeping stands aside
for exhilaration, for the temporary end
of clutter, for the empty space
that suddenly exists at home.
Broken bottles, yellow newspapers,
jeans torn at the crotch, will be forgotten
quicker than maiden aunts, high
school buddies, the bank manager
whose heart gave out approving loans.
The landfill is an unsentimental graveyard
of all that's past its time.
We get to throw out what's no longer needed
and it's never us.
