DONNA HILBERT

Domestic Arts

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.

Joined

Our kitchen, winter Sunday
boys playing on the floor,
I’m drying breakfast dishes
when I have the vision:
four chairs in front of a store
on a street I never travel.
Four chairs that will complete
our chair-less dining room suite.
I drive into the vision
and they are there,
with the same turned legs,
the same dark wood
as our furniture at home.
And on the bottom of one seat:
1927, date in the same hand
as on the table, underneath.

Everything sundered
wants reuniting,
everything rent, to mend.
So, I am not amazed Dear Heart
that nightly you walk
from the occluded country
to rest awhile with me.
Are not we
who have born three sons,
more joined than chair and table
turned from a single tree?

Donna Hilbert’s latest books are Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022 and Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. Publications include Chiron Review, Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, numerous anthologies and features including The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and Writers on Writing. More at donnahilbert.com.