Sanatorium

My mother sends me to Aunt Ethel's.
I walk practicing my diction
in the early morning heat.
She waits with her 90-year-old
father who turns, from time
to time, the spidery, blue
and yellow, limpid
flames of his hairless cheek
out of the brightening window
to the gloom behind him -
then says something witty
or critical and squeals
deep in the phlegmy solitude
of his throat. Beside him
sits an obese black cat,
no more in the window-light
than a vast silhouette
of its heartbeat.

          Ethel

stands at the stove
or sits on the sofabed
and laughs; her breaths
clamor against the billowing
steel of her diaphragm -
so tall and rotund,
her laughter whirls
above us, and encompasses us,
dizzies us, in its marble dome,
its impermeable starlit azure
of irony. For the war
is over, and her young lover's
left her, as she knew he would.

          What's not here
is my uncle, whom I remember
once only - somewhere outside
of Denver, on a veranda,
behind a screen or glass -
I am three; I am standing
between my parents on a field
of unending grass and deep
beyond in its greenness, now
throbbing and looming,
he is a robed figure
standing in the white haze
of that wire or the glass,
and waving at me,
and smiling.

From Playing the Numbers, University of North Dakota Press (1986).