with your grandfather's pipe
still puffing away in your arms.
You turn to rocking it soft
like an infant and cooing over it,
the copper manhole covers he stole
from old Chicago
shivering like bright pennies
below your feet. I always shift at night
to lifting our house, pipes and all,
to slow dance with it.
My angels are lazy and listen to me curse.
They do not fit a single finger
around the edges of the house to help me.
I follow you around until you grow tired
in your sleeping of gusting
out of gum wrappers and dust
sometimes twirling with your grandfather's pipe
under those stage lamps that sizzle on
like slow popcorn.
The music pipes between the brick
houses as if night were no more than felt
over our stereo speakers.
When you grow tired of foraging with your feet
among the old elms that laced
a kindly green arch over your childhood,
and under which you hot-footed it
with electric lines playing Double Dutch;
when you tire of threading your way
among those dying elms where you hop-scotched
the street lunging in and out of tar pools;
where you ponied up on the stirrups
of your banana seat bike to glide down that green
and leafy throat along Somerset.
When you stop dancing or threading
your way back through those skies that turned
swift like pages ripping over your shoulders,
you lie down like a fallen branch near the curb,
there where the water is rushing with its leafy boats
and twigs, there where the water is pouring
out of every stone and every brick.
I stack them like waterfalls one on top of each other
and set down our house.
©
is the author of We Bed Down Into Water
We’ve published eight more poems by Rybicki: “Smoke,” “Brother,” “Yellow-haired Girl with Spider,” “Julie Ovary Song,” “Two Movements for Martell Epperson,” “Near the Old Packard Plant,” “Night and its Strange Likeness to a Diego Rivera Mural,” and “It's Morning and I'm Trying on the Walls.”
