Hello again (So soon? you ask. Yes, I answer). I said I would be adding some of the poetry pieces I’ve found in notebooks, but this morning I was searching for one of them and came across something else. Call it serendipity. My shelf of notebooks is random and unlabeled, so I never know what it is until I open it,
This is an undated piece, but I’m fairly sure it was written in the past five or six years.
The picture wasn’t much. Rows of dolls on a shelf:
perhaps a scene from a toymaker’s workshop?
The one from Pinocchio– what was his name? But
that wasn’t right. He made puppets
and these were dolls, round-headed and dressed
in gingham and flounce bonnets, flaxen hair, eyes
staring out from the puzzle box
He, the husband, had brought it home from his trip this time.
Hours of fun he said as he set it on the dining table
Who doesn’t need some of that?
And she had smiled at him, not knowing the answer. She
had never been one for puzzles. They were for old people
sent to homes by their grown children who were
too successful and busy to ever visit
She stared at the box while he fixed himself a drink
in the other room, humming and she wondered
why anyone would do a puzzle when the picture
was right there on the box. You knew what it was,
and the picture wasn’t much. Dolls.
He, the husband patted the couch cushion next to him,
Come, sit as though commanding a dog, but she left the puzzle
on the table and crossed the room to be
with him, listened to him, the husband, talk about his trip
but it was hard to pay attention. She had never met
any of the people he talked about and in fact had
only the vaguest idea of what his job was, what it involved.
Some kind of sales, she expected, since he often spoke
of deals and competition with other men in his firm, other firms.
He, the husband, was often away for two
or three days at a time to St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City,
leaving their house on a weekday morning, coming back
before the weekend as though he’d only been at the office,
bringing with him a small gift to serve
as a token of greeting. The puzzle was merely
the most recent, and would probably sit unopened on the shelf
like the curious stuffed bird on a lacquered board
affixed with a small brass plate that said PTARMIGAN that once placed remained
largely unnoticed except the occasions when out of the corner
of her eye she could have sworn it moved. In those days
they’d had a cat, an overweight gray tabby whose exact name remained undecided
right up to his death which was caused by his pulling the stuffed bird
off the shelf and tearing it into a pile of feathers and excelsior and, she guessed
another thing, hidden, fatal if ingested by cats. Just as well, said the husband
when he had come home to find the mess and the dead animal left untouched
as though it was a crime scene. He’d picked up the cat with fire tongs and dropped it
into a black garbage bag along with the feathers and shavings, taken it all out
to the garage and set it in the bin just like normal trash
while she had lain in the bedroom waiting for it all to over.
For a long while there had been no trips and no gifts
but now that he had returned with the puzzle she assumed everything
would start up again just as it had been before. She got up and looked at the box again
on the table, the dolls on the shelf staring as though waiting for her
to dump the pieces out and get to work putting it all together,
working from the corners, each small fitting a minor triumph.
This would take some time. Hours, she guessed. Hours of fun
which with luck might turn into days
Thanks for reading