ELECTION

A woman inside a black and gold shade
is eating rice with small
red peppers shredded in it. She washes
her face, a large insect
with arcade pincer-like hands
clawing through silver-plated timepieces,
sunglasses with turquoise lenses and copper blades
for paring toenails or peaches.

This mind reader is a muse of terrible futures.
This morning she said
that she was not surprised by the pool
of urine on the kitchen tiles.
She did not berate the miniature dog
but rather her husband. He thinks,

while stepping over the waters,
that damn pond where the gray monk
drowned his two kittens. Sleeping
all winter, then the cook's sister
realizing the cold bastard was dead.

A clairvoyant from the suburbs of Detroit,
she whispers to her client
while choking on incense.
Suck it up, Dearie. The zipper scar
on your belly is romantic
like an amber centipede dragging itself
across wet rocks in Scottish moonlight.

And Doris left her partial plate
in a waterglass
in that new Denny's in Sandusky, Ohio.
George is not sleeping with your cousin Martha.
Neither is she sleeping with him.

She stirs the money in the tray.
A barrette out of place. She changes
dollars over peroxide and paint.
Laxatives and tranks.

She came to the bookstore in the dark, leaves now
in the rain. Whispering
again, this time into the cell,
telling her new lover,
from across town, that she's
a red haired cashier in an Algerian canteen. Then,

she steps into the wet neon and screams-
a stabbing pain to her temple, she smooths,
arranges her blouse
and speaks in her greening voice- I know
the very brand of carpet vacuum
Karl Rove, ten years from now,
will purchase for a summer house
in West Virginia- he sits

drinking a warm Bordeaux in the guilty dark
while the Electrolux's robot saucers and trolley
pass silently through the rooms collecting dirt.
Yes, Sweetie, an Electrolux
like some wonderful aqua bus decorated
with diamonds, ashes and citrine rough
literally lifting in the dark and out the window
over the Smokies, Everglades, the brown sea,
then over a retired Manhattan cop who's been diagnosed
with senile dementia-this, their last visit to the Yucatan.

He points up with the other tourists
standing there among claret paper lamps
across the rolling lawns of Palenque-
saying, 'I don't believe my eyes, Sondra,
but it looks just like the spaceship that blew up
over Palestine, Texas
while your brother, below, was taking
his famous dump in poison oak:

he thought it was Russian space junk,
the most beautiful sight in his life, until
later that night when Jill
caked his body in cortisone,
strapping his wrists in gauze to the camper bed
and then force feeding him valium

against, as his mother said, all circumstances? God
but he was red.’
Karl’s robot now negotiating
the plush stairs
is attacked by the fifteen pound tomcat
called Roosevelt
and that’s all they wrote about that boy’s toy.
Honey, I gotta go…                    like the man said,
‘history is progress.’