The world of underpants
BY DIANE SEUSS
was strange to her, as was
the world of fathers, and the world
of mothers, who seemed
to wear aprons,
and family
trees, though trees
she understood, and the tavern
by the lake, and the woman
with a black eye who lied
that she was kicked by a horse.
She understood
that she was the product
of something big, akin
to the sky but not the sky,
akin to the field but not the field,
she arrived
like the last creation from an old
assembly line, she had no
instruction manual, no one
knew what she was for
or how to use her, she seemed
to have no utility or purpose,
like a stone, or a bone
of an extinct creature the world
sees as having been minor
but monstrous.
She got quiet.
BY DIANE SEUSS
Then quieter.
People sensed disease. Something female,
from the waist
down. But it was not
disease. Please, she said
in her mind. She hoped
they were mind readers.
Stop monitoring me, she said in her mind.
She hated being monitored.
And the noise
of all their hypotheses.
She preferred the neutrality of trees.
At night, in the wind, trees creak.
Tree to tree, it is kind of a joke,
like an old woman saying she has
creaky bones while she is busy recreating
the world. Her voice,
like the voice of a witch on a children’s record.
Or the creaking of the floorboards
under the feet
of a girl sneaking
out in the dark of night to pee
in the weeds.
She called them, in her mind,
by their names. Althea. Queen
Anne’s Lace. Drop Seed.
Strange, back then,
alone,
squatting beneath
the owl-filled trees.
The majesty of the grain
BY DIANE SEUSS
elevator. And in the bank
barn, built profound into the hill
side, rabbits
in their hutches, the rustling
of ear against ear.
The swampy surreptitiousness
of men
leading double lives. Triple
shots of Fireball.
She cracks open
mint Lifesavers in the dark
bathroom watching
them spark inside the cave
of her open mouth.
The word for that:
triboluminescence.
The glamor of the freight
train rolling through.
Not face-down in the mashed potatoes but in bed
BY DIANE SEUSS
with his nightcap mashed
down over his toupee. Death
came to him that way.
They sprayed the corpse
with apple blossom perfume
and set him up
in a pine box in the big window
in the front room
next to the piano that defied
tuning. All the while his wife
made soap from lye and ashes
and milked the pitiful,
nameless cow and poured
her thin, warm, almost blue
milk into
the tin cream separator.
It was said
the wife had one pleasure:
Her flowers,
she called them.
That same summer the cherry
tree was a central figure
in the epic tale of the pre-teen
daughter shimmying
onto a weak
branch from her bedroom window.
When the first bone healed
she tried it again and broke the other.
Her arm was never
the same but who among us
is ever the same when the lid
is nailed shut on summer.
