[W T Clark]

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Another excuse not to clean up
this morning: caught, dust swarming in a lightbeam's head.
Contagion: this little dust, little sugar of the dead I am here
to watch stirred into a coffee of ground light.

How un-easily 'coffee' shifts to 'coffin'.
I shove my hand into the coffin
of my ancestors, who I will not clean up.

Here is the tree that suffered
my climbing & revenged itself
with a broken branch & arm. Here are the cellflakes
of my pastness snakeskinned into light,
to curdle with my ancestors: cockroach,
plaster, brick-dust & the dead:
here are their ashes in their primordial soup.

& here are the hundred other women
before me who did not clean up:
the thin arms, aborted broom; the startled eyes
confronted by her dustfaced predecessor:

she is caught in a new religion,
forgetting the lithe fleshhouses of husband
& children — sacrilegiously alive; her tongue
stretches & rusted languages rattle
...........their keys for her;
as if she could housewife light—
throat full to retching with names she has never remembered.

I will never clean up again—
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