Caterpillar, a painting by Lauren dela Roche © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery, New York City

Hard to square how much I wanted
with how much requested:

the ask and the take
like two inscribed columns against

a pink dawning margin, or the classic
rabbit-duck illusion hinging

on the aimless eye.
I was proper, merciful—

I wanted the warfarined mouse on the rug
to be sleeping only.

I watched the train flow by
and never once took it.

I was becoming a woman
like the dead:

fond of coins, dreams, cakes,
votives, hopeless

at adding to my deeds.
For a week I tried keeping

forks and spoons in separate
drawered slots. But everything

that aids you tends
toward a similar handle.

You accustom to a certain
blue enamel, to a few blue

inches between you
and the slop.

When I flushed away
my pills to make a baby
cross the red carpet
and tootle at the planetary flash

a recreant hunger rattled me.
I sat open-legged

at my husband’s feet
like a splayed magazine

and waited, paludal, for one
of the two ways of keeping book,

the rabbit, or the duck
—do you see

the long haul
as velveteen or bill?

Of “housekeeping” and “keeping house,”
which title tells you more

of how I did?
Any way

I looked, the neighbor’s dog downstairs
had a tumor behind

one eye standing
out poached and disabused.

The dryer in the basement
so stuffed along its hose with skin and thread

we wore our fellow tenants
like a beard.

The baby wore a trench and specs,
slipped back into the crowd.

As banister and vinyl
siding came undone, so too

my pretense to scholarship,
my hours at the institutes for tick and tock.

So-and-so’s drone, mic angled
like a rotting corsage,

it all seemed a tale absent
the frazzle of seduction,

Scheherazade at the fish counter
too behaved with the numbered

white tongue of her turn.
Waiting for the sign to match her slip.

One can wait to be swept up
for weeks and weeks.

Rattling in my carrel, how I wanted out
to my yellow-sided house,

my Decadent Movement.
Malady of dreaming!

The basement with its gallery of paint cans,
the washer-dryer leashed

to ghosts and fumes.
The “good eye” rufous, desperately twinkling,

its confrere blind and bulging
like a belly. Years after, dog and banister

put or taken down,
I still have my domestic arts.

I rent and rend and rut.
I think I think of certain animals

as the signs for certain years
because there is no actual heir to flesh.

Rabbit, duck, or dogfish,
any eye could be the volta.

Nights when the train veered by,
almost and never reaching us,

I licked my cornered parts
the way a dog would

or a duck parting its plumage to unearth
its secret fur-white coney pelt, having

always favored the open gloss
over being over it.