DAD'S LUNCH BOX

artwork: ralph murre

DAD’S LUNCH BOX

by Donna Hilbert

Dad climbs down

the telephone pole,

stretches out under a pepper tree,

opens his lunch box:

black metal,

substantial like a vault,

or a government building

in a Balkan country.

Under its dome

wire arms hold

a Thermos of coffee.

On the bottom floor,

Vienna sausages on a bed

of mayonnaise, white bread.

For dessert, butterscotch

cream-center cookies.

Dad unwraps a sandwich, eats.

He pours coffee into the cup

his Thermos lid makes,

dips a cookie, watches it bloat,

then holds his lips to the rim,

slips the sweet bits

into his mouth.

I like to think

he savors pleasure

before he stands the box on one end,

touches a forefinger to his tongue,

his damp fingertip

gleaning crumbs

to feed the sparrows who wait

in slender leaves.

Then, one foot

over the other,

he climbs the pole again.

~ first published in PEARL

1942 Snapshot of my Father

artwork: ralph murre

1942 Snapshot of my Father

by Donna Hilbert

He could be my child,

this boy at seventeen,

centered in front of a palm tree

in the parkway

of his sister’s yard.

This motherless kid,

in a borrowed sports coat

and slacks that fold

too deeply over his shoes.

His curly hair is combed back.

His lips part in an almost grin.

I know the history of this picture:

how he came to California to find work.

How he dug ditches, riveted metal,

picked fruit,

returned to Oklahoma to marry his girl

before he turned eighteen.  Nothing

to remark about, given the war.

And I know the life that followed:

the guns hidden in chimneys, bruises

under scarves, how the half-smile

concealed a boozy rage.  Still,

it moves me:

how he glistens in this picture,

the deep crease of his slacks,

his boyish curls.

~ previously published in Mansions (Event Horizon Press)

SEATTLE

photo: sharon auberle

SEATTLE

by Donna Hilbert

“ . . . but Wilson had no car.  He felt almost intolerably lonely.”

                                    Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

So homesick, I engaged wrong numbers

in conversation

for the sound of another

human voice

that year in Seattle when it rained three hundred days.

Not hard as it would at home

and then be done for months,

but just a light piss,

air always damp

like the baby’s diaper.

I watched pink fingers of mold

double every day

in the corner of the window

looking out on evergreens and endless grass.

I longed for LA--

palm trees and Hybrid Bermuda,

trees that let in light and grass with grace

enough to die back

yellow in the winter.

I hated the rain the natives praised

“rain makes everything green,” they’d say,

deranged as they were on chlorophyll and caffeine.

I was green too at nineteen,

with a shiny new husband, one baby,

belly ripening with the next.

My husband studied engineering at the U.

And I studied too--his books from World Lit—

Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus.

My favorite was Graham Greene

The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter—

burnt-out-cases

adrift in the existential sea.

And I thought then that I

was more displaced

than any whiskey priest or disaffected spy

which I declared to any wrong number

who would take the time

to listen.

~ first published in Fire

Deshacer

photoart: ralph murre

Deshacer

by Donna Hilbert

I open the garage door

and our dog bounds free

across the street

disappearing down the alley,

her black form unmade

by the moonless night.

I panic, run in circles with the leash

but you calmly cross the street

calling her name.

Because she loves you

she lets you bring her home.

I won’t repeat the dream

in which you leave me.

Let’s just say I know the world,

how it alters in an instant,

that I awaken sick

in remorse and dread.

I can’t face again the dinners

with other lonely women,

then late-night TV

until the dog and I can bear

to go to bed.

I don’t need again to learn

the bitter lesson

that everything I love

is a flame between two fingers.

~ first published in Beggars & Cheeseburgers

In the First Years

artwork: ralph murre

In the First Years

by Donna Hilbert

I don’t know exactly what he does all day,

my fresh-pressed engineer

how his slide-rule calculates

movement buried in the passageways

of pipes and tanks.

He uses words like

volatile, effluent, pressure.

But, I know what I do

rumpled mommy of two,

in a neighborhood so strange

I think it dangerous to stroll them to the park

alone. Mostly, I stay home

and wash piles of laundry

I never sort or fold,

cook food that doesn’t taste quite right,

although I won’t admit

nothing’s ever really good.

Sometimes I drive him to work

when I want the car to visit

my mother in the valley.

The refinery air is sulfurous

and thick, it makes the babies

in the back-seat gag, get sick,

vomit with such force they splatter my back

with flecks of puke, so I never

come entirely clean.

We go back after dusk

to pick him up.

The air still stinks, but the tanks

light up like Christmas.

In a couple of years the plant explodes

leaving a co-worker dead.

And, I will throw a plate of spaghetti

a whisper from my husband’s head.

But in the first years, no notion

of what comes after—

the fragile welds that held us

a match strike from disaster.

~ first published in 5 A.M.

Domestic Arts

photoart: ralph murre

Domestic Arts

by Donna Hilbert

I am a young mother

so bored staying home

I agree to play Bridge

with my neighbors,

whom I suspect put up with me

to find a fourth to fill the table.

They are goddesses of domestic arts,

and between games hold forth

on finer points of decoupage, macramé

and the transformation of cans

into casseroles.

Still I am smug,

for I have gifts of my own:

precognitive dreams

and gift of the phone,

which I demonstrate by chanting

Mother Mother Mother Dear

call me now while my friends are here,

and when the phone rings

they are believers.

Because I love an audience,

I tell them my dreams:

how I see trash cans burning

the night before they burst in flame

behind my house,

how Papa’s heart attack

awakens me from sleep.

How I knew the night before she labored

Jan’s baby boy would be born dead.

Now the neighbors play three-handed games—

Pinochle, Euchre—

keep their children indoors,

cross against the light

when they see me coming.

~ first published in Tears in the Fence

Waste

photo: ralph murre

Waste

by Donna Hilbert

To change the water, I pluck

last week’s tulips from their vase,

but the turbans unhinge in my hands,

orange cups upend in the sink,

with underside bands

of stem-colored green revealed.

A still life subject, I think:

tulips in their disrepair.

My love is a painter. Daily I tell him,

paintings are everywhere

but poems, my dear, are rare.

I am not a painter,

so I drop the old petals into a sack

with over-ripe cheese, uneaten fruit

and down the back stairs I march

the whole tableau to the trash.

~ first published in Tears in the Fence