Elizabeth Tibbetts

“Coming Home”

Oh, God, the full-faced moon is smiling at me
in his pink sky, and I'm alive, alive (!)
and driving home to you and our new refrigerator.
A skin of snow shines on the mountain beyond Burger King
and this garden of wires and poles and lighted signs.
Oh, I want to be new: I want to be the girl I saw
last night at the mike, sex leaking from her fingertips
as they traveled down to pick at her hem.
She was younger than I've ever been, with hair cropped,
ragged clothes, and face as clear as a child's.
She read as though she were in bed, eyes half closed,
teeth glistening, her shimmering body written
beneath her dress. She held every man in the audience
taut, and I thought of you. Now I'm coming home
dressed in my sensible coat and shoes, my purse
and a bundle of groceries beside me. When I arrive
we'll open the door of our Frigidaire
to its shining white interior, fill the butter's
little box, set eggs in their hollows, slip meats
and greens into separate drawers, and pause
in the newness of the refrigerator's light
while beside us, through the window,
the moon will lay a sheet on the kitchen floor

In The Lingerie Store

They’re enough to make anyone want
a restless body, flawless skin, and a hint
of flowers between the legs, these films
the color of evening clouds and silk cups
with slivered bones, thin as a baby’s ribs.
But in the dressing room, when I wrestle
out of heavy clothes, and stand, exposed
before the mirror, fear turns me around
to check for hidden cameras, because
my breasts that rode happily all day
now lie there sleepy and blue-veined
in the thin light and refuse to fit these
frail contraptions.
Outside, it’s dusk.
The sky is the deep blue of a slip I admired;
a half moon reclines above the roof tops.
Here, I can imagine again you watching
as I undress each night. Oh, and I remember
how once my engorged breasts felt like bombs,
tight and intricately mapped with veins,
the ducts swollen like juice sacs
inside an orange, how I could spray a stream
across the room, and how my infant son
flashed his eyes at me, bit down, and finally
sucked as though his life depended on it.

It Is Time

I’m no more an angel of mercy than you
who dropped me here and flapped away.
(I still hear the wuh, wuh of your wings

as you lift above the trees.) I’m more
of a flashlight than heavenly body,
shining my little beam room to room,

up and down these hallways of trouble:
stump where a foot once wagged, belly
zipped with an incision, face gripping

the news It is time. I proffer no magic
from my medicine bag of science, only
gauze, antibiotics, narcotics. But I try

to cross the divide between two lives.
Sometimes, when I sit with a man whose
cells are eating him alive, or when I wash

the face of a woman who’ll never lift
her arms again, and I find myself lost
inside my own body, I sense your descent,

that wing-flicker of wind on my neck,
just before you seize me and carry me
off again in your fierce version of salvation.

Snow

The old, blue-eyed woman in the bed
is calling down snow. Her heart is failing,
and her eyes are two birds in a pale sky.
Through the window she can see a tree

twinkling with lights on the banking
beyond the parking lot. Lawns are still green
from unseasonable weather. Snow
will put things right; and sure enough,

by four, darkness carries in the first flakes.
Chatter, hall lights, and the rattle of walkers
spill through her doorway as she lies there
ten miles (half a world) of ocean

between her and her home island.
She looks out from a bed the size of a dinghy.
Beyond the lit tree, beyond town, open water
accepts snow silently and, farther out,

the woods behind her house receive the snow
with a faint ticking of flakes striking needles
and dry leaves-a sound you would not believe
unless you've held your breath and heard it.

“Swimming”

“Do you skinny dip?” he asks, this man
caught behind plate glass while the green,
late-summer world beckons and glitters
outside. We’ve been talking about swimming—
the draw of quarry, ocean, lake, and stream.
I don’t answer, but describe my morning
immersions with my dog in the silken pond.

I don’t say how I go daily for water’s caress,
to find my own pulse and breath, listen
for God, learn my length and breadth. I don’t
mention that I carry my basket of troubles
down to be washed. Sometimes this job
(this life) breaks my heart with its losses
and riches. Why not say, “yes”, crack the old

professional code (it’s only love that sustains us)
and give, along with his morphine, a glimpse
again of a body swimming unencumbered.
Instead, I place my hands on his frail back
and press my fingers along the muscles and bones
of his shoulders and spine where he still knows
every stroke, everything that’s touched him.

The Waiting

When I played Old Maid, my great aunts
were what fell to me with the losing card:
hairnets, brooches, cotton stockings,

and lessons. One does not show ones knees
or panties, one saves everything. But now,
it’s as though they were never here, my aunts

who left and moved out of life with my childhood
shut in their fat black purses, leaving me
a bed and linens, a collection of thread.

Now, I’m trying to go back to the table
where eighty-pound Mida served up turkey
and admonitions, her small body a vessel

for words that slapped my hands off the table
in that cramped dining room, dark as church,
where my mother, in pearls, passed cut glass

bowls of cranberries and pickles to my quiet father.
Corrine, soft and bosomy, and thin Mida would pop up
simultaneously to fill dishes, as if they’d spent

their lives together practicing for this. We ate
and ate as November light lowered into the trees,
until the white linen and silver grew dull,

and I was excused to the living room
with my brothers and the afternoon sun.
While the grownups drank coffee from thin cups

we played with the only toy, a wooden pin dish
with a magnet-beaked bird perched on a spring,
and we lay on the rug, bad, modern children,

snapping the spring so hard the bird went wild
and spilled pins on the floor. I grew hot and tired
waiting, and found myself drifting further
and further away beneath the slow-ticking clock.