The Last Day

At year's end, the garden bare, whatever
lives there locked in the grip of zero, blessed be
habits that keep you warm through iron weather:

Light-led motion from sleep to stove to larder,
clink of dishes, clatter of spoons and forks
arranging themselves like words into ritual order;

Clear pour of water under clotted stems
and swollen arthritic joints of old begonias;
Dusting and sweeping out of rooms;

Froth of soiled wash in baptismal suds
and brisk embrace that leaves it fresh and folded;
The stroll between canyons of canned goods,

choosing simple quarry you hunt by proxy,
hiss and slap of mail through the brass lip
of solitude, inviting life in, (but slowly

not too close, or the trapper's scented
lure will draw you out into danger,
into some false thaw, the cry of the hunted);

By night, the slink into sleep again, turning
in that wound-licking posture flesh remembers,
wanting nothing to come but one more morning.

--Rhina P. Espaillat (1932- ), Dominican-American poet

"Find Work"

I tie my Hat-- I crease my Shawl—
Life's little duties do—precisely
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
—Emily Dickinson, #443

My mother’s mother, widowed very young
of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,
moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue
and country heart anaesthetized and mute
with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
“Find work,” she would reply to every grief—
and her one dictum, whether false or true,
tolled heavy with her passionate belief.
Widowed again, with children, in her prime,
she spoke so little it was hard to bear
so much composure, such a truce with time
spent in the lifelong practice of despair.
But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,
her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

-- Rhina P. Espaillat (1932- ), award-winning Domincan- American poet