Implement

To be born with a chin

so forlorn it’s a buttress against the neck

a night without sleep

            an Emily Dickinson impression

stubbornly held to; the kind that hopes

neighbours will remark            My! doesn’t she look a poetess

 

It was their compromise that the pitchfork

sit front in his hand, a whole fist

around its shoulders

with finger room for spare

            it was infidelity’s price

 

but how she loved its delicately

tripled tongue, the sharpness

of that humour

            off-set by its cleft - into

the wooden handle      that it was upright

and while directionless - aspirational -

Implement

in the way that it never bent

sometime had reinforced itself with another

kind of wood

            dependence & need

            all holding

it together

 

***

 

She waited for life to change

having read about it somewhere

before, as far off as childhood, how the dish

ran away with the spoon & the moon

was just this facilitator to romance

                       and then, there was this fork

in sync with her lunar cycle

scratched with love

in hedgerows

                                    so she waited for the signal:

Implement

the cow’s jump

 

it just lowed in the pasture & other such stereotypes

of bovine indifference

 

***

 

Anywhere off in the middle distance

she saw a future

            where her deftly dimpled chin met

the cleft of its metal in sleep each night

on a motel pillow made of neon with signs

they had always dreamed about

that were not cheap, but intimate acrylic;

cotton still smelling              of hay

straight from the bottle