A woman inside a black and gold shade
            is eating rice with small
            red peppers shredded in it. She washes
            her face, a large insect
            with arcade pincer-like hands
            clawing through silver-plated timepieces,
            sunglasses with turquoise lenses and copper blades
            for paring toenails or peaches.

            This mind reader is a muse of terrible futures.
            This morning she said
            that she was not surprised by the pool
            of urine on the kitchen tiles.
            She did not berate the miniature dog
            but rather her husband. He thinks,

            while stepping over the waters,
            that damn pond where the gray monk
            drowned his two kittens. Sleeping
            all winter, then the cook's sister
            realizing the cold bastard was dead.

            A clairvoyant from the suburbs of Detroit,
            she whispers to her client
            while choking on incense.
            Suck it up, Dearie. The zipper scar
            on your belly is romantic
            like an amber centipede dragging itself
            across wet rocks in Scottish moonlight.

            And Doris left her partial plate
            in a waterglass
            in that new Denny's in Sandusky, Ohio.
            George is not sleeping with your cousin Martha.
            Neither is she sleeping with him.

            She stirs the money in the tray.
            A barrette out of place. She changes
            dollars over peroxide and paint.
            Laxatives and tranks.

            She came to the bookstore in the dark, leaves now
            in the rain. Whispering
            again, this time into the cell,
            telling her new lover,
            from across town, that she's
            a red haired cashier in an Algerian canteen. Then,

            she steps into the wet neon and screams-
            a stabbing pain to her temple, she smooths,
            arranges her blouse
            and speaks in her greening voice- I know
            the very brand of carpet vacuum
            Karl Rove, ten years from now,
            will purchase for a summer house
            in West Virginia- he sits

            drinking a warm Bordeaux in the guilty dark
            while the Electrolux's robot saucers and trolley
            pass silently through the rooms collecting dirt.
            Yes, Sweetie, an Electrolux
            like some wonderful aqua bus decorated
            with diamonds, ashes and citrine rough
            literally lifting in the dark and out the window
            over the Smokies, Everglades, the brown sea,
            then over a retired Manhattan cop who's been diagnosed
            with senile dementia-this, their last visit to the Yucatan.

            He points up with the other tourists
            standing there among claret paper lamps
            across the rolling lawns of Palenque-
            saying, 'I don't believe my eyes, Sondra,
            but it looks just like the spaceship that blew up
            over Palestine, Texas
            while your brother, below, was taking
            his famous dump in poison oak:

            he thought it was Russian space junk,
            the most beautiful sight in his life, until
            later that night when Jill
            caked his body in cortisone,
            strapping his wrists in gauze to the camper bed
            and then force feeding him valium

            against, as his mother said, all circumstances? God
            but he was red.’
            Karl’s robot now negotiating
            the plush stairs
            is attacked by the fifteen pound tomcat
            called Roosevelt
            and that’s all they wrote about that boy’s toy.
            Honey, I gotta go…                    like the man said,
            ‘history is progress.’

Copyright © Norman Dubie, 2006. All Rights Reserved.