VALLEY NOTES

When you are old and live alone,
dying alone is anticipated. The hand you
grasp is your own, the odors the body
gives off are ones you recognize, only sharper. Even rank.
During moments like these, a house fills up with sounds,
not of people, but of ghosts and sometimes,
of machines. The black Singer downstairs
whirs like a primitive insect trapped under glass
or pin-stuck to cardboard before expiring.
(These things thrill a boy.) Suddenly
your skin is laced with stitches and regret,
and while there are places you didn't cut,
that doesn't matter much now.
As a girl, your hand got wedged in the wringer
and for a moment, it seemed the whole room
might gnaw its way up your arm.
Your mother said this should teach
you a lesson, but you forgot what
you learned because you didn't write it down.
Sometimes you failed to pay attention,
even when it mattered, especially then.
Not far from where you lived,
stood a house with peeling shutters.
Late November, the year nearly gone,
the occupant fell down the cellar stairs
and broke her hip. On makeshift shelves,
stewed tomatoes pulsed inside jars
opaque with dust. Upstairs, acquired
birds twittered inside their cages.
After their keeper died, all the small birds perished.
One large bird survived by eating
the flesh from its own breastbone.

Jayne Pupek