France, 1990
The pan-fried, half-moon,
butter-browned omelet was richer
than Versailles’ cold mirrors, stark
shrubs, boudoir cherubs, pebbled-
walks, or cardinals in a line.
It was better than the mechanical bird
the African sold me outside the bus
that flew in circles without a string.
It was before and after the time of Marie
Antoinette. It was the hole the angel
burned into the bishop’s skull
for Mont St. Michel on a gray
day—mudflats below the crag
like a wet towel on the deck. It was
Therese’s tattered arm on the altar,
in crystal, and the billboard nude
in Paris. Sister said, “Don’t look.”
Roadside America
She drove halfway home. The first
rest stop was crowded. The Starbucks
line was too long, so I got
gas station coffee.
One cashier
worked the line while two other
gray-shirted workers talked near
stacked cartons. A man, wearing overalls,
in front of me said, “The next government
to get overthrown will be this one.
Nobody wants to work.” I tell him
my grandfather was a black-topper.
It’s good
he died before all this. He might
have shot someone. Or worse, given
up. Let the Miller Genuine Draft
get warm, the dogs starve, the ducks
go wild, the wood stove rust,
the striped turtle slip out, the horse’s
hair tangle, the garden remain mud.
Dropcloth
Mr. Lawrence brought back my ladder,
drop cloth, step ladder, a new
roller, a tray, and pads, for the brush I didn’t
care about. My roller from fifteen years
ago works better than the new ones.
The arm, from handle to pad, is angled, not
straight back. No matter how thick
the steel is, the forty-five-degree-angled
arm outperforms the ninety-degree-
angle-arm. It’s not thickness, it’s
physics.
He said he wasn’t sure if all
the dropcloths were mine. I recognized splatters
from old jobs: stairs, ramps, doors,
windows, walls. One used to be Sheehan’s,
but I claimed it for the hand-sander they kept.
There’s a fluidity on worksites. That’s why
I wrote my name on the step ladder.
I spread out the big drop cloth—
three-paneled splash art—and set
the aluminum garden trellises on it
to spray. The negative, like an x-ray,
or Jesus’ face on the Turin shroud, remained.
The triptych had outlived marriages.
It had dashes and dots from Joey and Brooke’s shutters.
They liked Neil Diamond. He thought of joining
the Masons for business. She met a boy in a hotel.
Their maroon shutters had clouded. “Paint them black,”
like the Rolling Stones. The sun baked them dry
on the lawn and a skunk wobbled into the street–
blind and spitting like a drunk. We threw rocks.
It climbed into the sewer.
Old tools
remember money made in the sun—threadbare
jeans sealed by paint. The way the skin
oil consumes the bronze nose of the boar.
Matthew Hummer is a writer and teacher in PA. He has published poems and prose in various journals, including Cosmic Daffodil and Novus Literary and Arts Journal.
