The Mother

 

            Where the Hell is everyone? She is alone again. It’s cocktail hour and there’s no cocktail. No nice little frosted glass of that California chardonnay she liked. No nicely starched butler to serve it to her. The butler. Oh yes. The butler had died. No more Grasshoppers. No more being called Madam. She liked that. “Madam” Had a nice little ring to it. He was an annoyingly bothersome man but she had fun with him. She got him back. He thought he had won all those times he snotted her. She got him back after all. But she did miss him. Now there was no one to play with. No evening repartee. The sun set all by itself and there were no canapés to slip down with it or sly smiles to edge around the windy nights. His wife didn’t cook anymore she wept into the food, making the soup watery and the sauce, curdled. It really wasn’t any fun around the dinner hour. Not that there was fun around any other hour either. What the hell happened to fun? They had fun years ago when there were parties and people were over and they dressed up: wore clothes from the cedar closet and slipped away to corners of the house where no one was. Corners where things happened that you might have only dreamed have and the next day everything was back to black and white.  The trouble was with the weather, everyone knew that.

 

It was dark more often,

Hurricanes came: wars, rain, tears, liquid made from pain,

Explosions in our minds without warning,

Soon it will be too dark to see.

The world longs for another,

A sister globe to pull up alongside us,

And she can unload us, her human crop,

To start again on a pure globe, free of the knowledge of destruction,

Filled with rich ochre and rudimentary origin

A sister ship of optimism,

She will slide alongside before winter, and the first to go aboard are the ones

Who are dying from the pain of the watch.