Gamma Egg on Memorial Day

Take me for a floribunda-headed tuft! The hat’s
a formality one unsupervised
mirror, knowing no better, picked out for me; alas,                       
rash millinery,
but might’ve turned me out even more unbecomingly
                           
among the cemetery decor, half plastic & spattered,
the whole famdamnily outing indignant
over its hour-&-a-
half already behind a schedule. Thanks
to me, also, refreshments I promised & made & mustn’t I know
I set right here, it was checkered
linen in russet wicker.

Private graces: I bless to such
grandbabies as these of mine
& worldwide the paradisiacal islands of the pancreas
& all the kindly endocrines, whose penitential cells
seep, sweet, even in sleep careless

sleep & likewise all the waking hours I keep
love at it, lub-dub. The heart
unskilled like a fist, squishing the love along
to distribute among the subtlest
capillaries to nourish
cell bulbs originating the grandbabies’
eyelashes, even.

Why do you live with us, Gamma Egg?
You know, I was off on
a way, the way, my own, the one I like
to get, the one you always seem to, & just then
because of the exprovising
implosive devices, the loving astray.

He Recollects Her Finery

I’d just about sweet-talked closing time
into home-to-my-love when its very last
moment stumbled clumsily upon, ah,
the true me. O dear, o dear.

Such-as-it-is was my sad shape.
What sad hands must’ve dug the slick
gray clay clods of me once from a drum?
Slapped-on, then, & thumbing me through

successive misdisfigurements,
as against what innocent armature formerly
tingling shyly to what high promise,
witticism & incipient flesh tones?

Look what the cat dragged in
& drops & purrs to, sniffs it & seizes it up
& trots on ahead, repeating at each threshold.
All in my honor, a long scatter of plumage.  

Martha Zweig’s collections include Monkey Lightning, Tupelo Press, 2010; Vinegar Bone (1999, and What Kind (2003), both published by Wesleyan University Press, and Powers (1976) a chapbook from the Vermont Arts Council. She has received Hopwood and Whiting awards; three of her poems were featured in Poetry.  Her MFA is from Warren Wilson College.