Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, Ph.D.

Poet/Scholar

by Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, in Glyph

Rose Jones, Cleaning-Woman

Hospital switchboard operator:

"Mrs. Jones expired a half hour ago."

 

 

Now you are dead thirty minutes

I will dream you

 

in layers

of the rain's gray light

 

and the dream has you singing

elegant notes

thin as silver knives

 

with your arms leaning

like sleeping rabbits

against your window

 

as long wet mercuries roll down the pane

cracking it changeably

 

and dreaming you

I dust secret corners in your feelings

and dream loaves of mutual balm

 

and you, dreaming, fire me to sweeping

all the glum minerals out

of Bed-Stuy, out,

out to the edges of the rivers,

 

and your sister, kneeling, bangs

tin pans

to erase with crashes

the drunken man at your funeral,

with his steel eyes and lips,

and the thunder climbs

calling back a green Carolina universe

 

while under the shadows of our morning noises

you sing carvings

 

and make a church

of gray layers there

in your newest neatness.

Copyright © 2008 by Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio

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