From Marian Poem by Morgan Michaels

There she stood-but how changed!
Her shallow back toward me, behind my tree
Draped by the pleats of her pink housedress
A sallow crescent of chest showing
Her sandstone-colored arms hanging
Limp at her sides from pinkish sleeves
Bulky as expired beach-balls
Her face the color of pasta, cooked and drained
Cancre strewn, her
Carefully rinsed (not that I ever knew) pale blonde hair
Grown shockingly gray
Around those miraculous cheek bones
Her thin hand moved to her face
As if she were thinking of something.

Mom had sent me over to check on her
And learn if she was alright or needed anything,
That was the sort of thing women did, I knew.
Men got up, shrugged, shaved, disappeared,
Women stayed home and checked up on things-
Division of labor absolutely tribal
A late-century version of the agriculture thing
The bourgeois (so useful, so awful) in a nutshell.
It being summer and the weather good
I walked the half-mile horseshoe of rutted road
That connected our lawn with Marion's,
That speeding cars churned up cyclones of dust on
Grains of which found their way between your teeth
And which, (furthermore) took an hour plus to subside.
Bob-Whites (birds that say their own name) whistled merrily,
Pheasants, unseen, called each other in the brush
Blue-sulphur butterflies walzed each other straight up
Small, purple, yellow-centered asters-weedy flowers-
Oggled me from the for-sale lots. Across the road
Through an acre stand of athetotic trees
Glinted the lake, diamond blue, divotted by an isle
Of loden green, which foolish people said floated
But I thought probably didn't,
All capped by the mellowest blue sky.
As I kicked a stone ahead I questioned why?
How could sickness be in such a land?
And how could it fall to anyone I knew?
And what should I find to meet me when I got there?
I didn't rush but bravely soldiered on-
After all, when you mother says do, you do
Right? -mothers largely readying men for marriage
And the propagation of the species, no?
But mournful mission, merry morning, I
Being a good boy, did exactly as bid.

She didn't see me or know I was there
I felt that strange blend of guilt
And exultation known to spies alone.
Practice had taught me to move quietly enough-
It was almost subversive how quietly I moved.
So when a red-eyed horsefly lit on my bare arm
And rubbed its forelegs together hungrily
And waggled its sheet-metal colored abdomen
(oh, bravery from fear) I simply let it bite.