Those Garages

I

Seeing them in their aged awkwardness

I wonder were the ladies ever young;

before their insides knew the scrape of rakes,

before their resined ceilings nursed the sun

and the paper iris and the shriveling hide

broke over the lank frames, while the doors

like long abandoned bureaus leaned

warped by language, those painted Polish sores.

Tn seclusion by the drainpipe and ashcan

they draw their bones up straight and wait to die,

erect in trivial nakedness, unafraid

but for the passing junkman and his venal eye.

u

She harbors the unhoused, lending a roof

to the lame remains of summary days:

inwardly she speaks a dumb reproof

to life, its apprehensive paraphrase

where the sawdust falls out of the dead doll

on the floor, mixing with the green oil

and ropes decaying over the bent trowel,

clayed with fingering cement for soil.

She found in common lot a twisted vigor

and greying strength in leaving things unsaid:

the old bathtub as reclining figure,

or coming upon people in the bed,

I

As I would turn my back on secondhand stores

with their dim glimpses of a weeping past,

so my practiced eye tightens insensibly

against the scene below this kitchen window

and with a damp forehead and moist hair,

pressed into the stiff camisole I skim a cup

over the simmering stock, dreamily aware

of congoleum geometrics rigid in orange voodoo

on the floor, as the treacherous ear undoes

unwilling eyes and the women's whisperings

rise and cling to the humid air, catching

conceptual aberrations beyond repair;

while the packing cases are opened and closed,

ni e hundred pounds of soap are loaded on a truck,

and far away on the lattermost garage

indifferent elms drum their gummy branches

to a new ignition. There a motor runs all the inches

towards the sun, carrying the small spark away

from the warm thing slumped in the posture of last desire,

knowing it walked alive into the mausoleum.

There is a shadow on the noon hour,

the light has left the kitchen; noislessly

a hair has disappeared into the soup;

far out at sea an egg aborts into a wave.

FınvoLA Drury

THE ORACLE