by Brett Rutherford
for Barbara Holland
There is no use
deceiving her.
Her hooded eyes, in
shadow, see
each shade and its
dim penumbra.
Drinking lapsang
souchong
tea at my Sixth
Avenue loft,
she spies the
nightshade, the wolfbane,
purpling the herbal
window sill.
At pre-dawn hour
when all others slumber,
she skulks by, just
when my illegal pet
happens to dangle a
tangible limb
out and then down
the fire escape, three floors.
No one was meant to
see that tentacle
as it lowered trash
to the waiting can!
When she joins in
my poetry circle,
my Siamese cat
athwart her lap-book,
her balletic toe
lifts up the carpet,
revealing last
night’s chalked-in Pentagram.
“Really!” she
chides. “Demons don’t answer calls
that easily, and I
should know.”
From sidewalk she
called, “Are you on fire, or what?”
that night my more
musty conjurations
failed to clear the
chimney top and gasped
out every window of
my loft.
“Nothing to see!” I
shouted down at her,
“A meatloaf did not
survive the oven!”
Somehow one shard
of carbon-clot
detached and
followed her, and stayed —
I let it, to punish
her being so much
in the way of
learning my business.
Yet she is
obstinate. My tea and talk
are just too much
to her liking, so back
she comes, her
raccoon-collar coat turned up
against the cloud
that hovers there,
on my command. Week
after week,
that black and
personal drizzle hounds
her Monday walks
through Chelsea streets.
Umbrellas are of no
avail;
they leak into her mouse-brown hair.
Wind blows the rain sideways at her
they leak into her mouse-brown hair.
Wind blows the rain sideways at her
as she hurls
herself among
bus shelters and doorway awnings.
bus shelters and doorway awnings.
There is no waiting
out the storm.
The manual of
sorcery explains:
it is easier to
start bad weather,
than to stop it.
[Revised May 2019].
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