Snapware In the Rain

You were right about the snapware, my life was full
of old pizza pans and tupperware from 1983, ziplock
baggies in my drawers, I criticized your shopping choice
when you cut a sharp turn into the driveway last summer
in my Toyota RAV4, always digging your heel so hard
into the carpet beneath the clutch that you eventually
wore a small hole there, you with your size 13 feet-
bounding into the house all excited, after having tossed
the majority of pots and pans and storage containers
of mine away on that way hot July day I couldn't contain,
you were excited and alive and said, here, is what you need:
snapware from Costco and I used your ATM card to pay!

It's December, a few days short of winter Solstice
and the desert is locked down in an unusual
several day spree of icy rain, dark days, a stillness
not infrequent in summer but odd in its gray appeal
and insistence on flooding the Whitewater Wash a block away,
all those meals I didn't guard, before you came into my life,
leftovers given a new lease on their expiration dates.

Cold, dark, wet, firelogs burning in the faux-Santa Fe place,
I drink hot tea and contemplate braving the cold rain
that will streak down my face and plaster my hair
against my head the way you have done with your wide hands
wet, the two of us in the pool, laughing at hot stars after heated days

And many extra portions of food are snapped and locked away
in those hard plastic containers of many different shapes and size,
broccoli, a bit of smoked salmon, leftover turkey chili with corn
I can barely finish a can of food alone and the appetite is thin,
I just put in a new pool motor, the old one broke when you moved.

Snapware, perfect for organizing and stacking my expensive life
as though there were some kind of order that will make up for you
not being here to share the darkest coldest nights of the year
the way you were last year, supernova vegetables, inoculated against
damp spoilage, protected from the sharp cuts of your voice

while around me, the sky turns the world into puddles, flash floods
and in the nearby mountains, a mute burial under many feet of snow

Dec 17, 2008
Take Your Pill