ALONE TOO MUCH FOR MONTHS

Everyone’s reading Defoe.
My life’s no different, just more compressed.
I bake a cherry pie
call my mother in California.
Her voice has cobwebs, bits of Polaroid
flake off as she speaks, bits of snarled tapes.
Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee.
Lake house, bikinis.
Now, missing an eye, she has to calculate
depth using the engineers at work
in her roomy skull.
I wanted to live there once
under her cap of dark hair.
She was the Princess of Dogs and Tulips
and Books and curvy green
Bottles of Coca-Cola.
People laughed at me in those days
for never looking up when I walked.
I saw dimes, pawprints in soft dirt,
blue jay feathers.
Not everyone’s reading Defoe.
Most don’t read at all. More for me, I say.
Let the books yawn with loneliness
salivate for my grubby fingers.

Margaret Diehl has published a chapbook of poems it all stayed open (Red Glass Books, 2011), two novels and a memoir (Men, 1989, Me and You, 1990 and The Boy on the Green Bicycle, 1999, all from Soho Press) as well as poems, short stories, and essays in literary journals