"I Can't Put Enough Household Objects in This Poem To Equal Your Wonderfulness" by Molly Tenenbaum

I Can’t Put Enough Household Objects in This Poem To Equal Your Wonderfulness

You are as perfect an invention as the egg slicer.
You’re as pleasing as the first push of the potato masher.
You‘re the pull through matter, taut wire

and its pane of gold glass cheese. In the galaxy
of countertop crumbs, you’re the Goldilocks zone.
You move through rooms. As pleated and rolled

as magazines in the basket, as margin-marked,
fluttered with post-its, as the 600-page book
about weather and art. The drying pajamas,

bottoms and tops, lightly conduct their breezy orchestra
on the one sunny day of late March.
The tiny violets brought in for the windowsill —

though a close-up nose can’t smell them,
they ripple the house. One drop in water,
the deep, the paler color. The mouthfeel

of names, barbaresco, manzanilla, tempranillo,
and the labels with animal pictures they say
sell wine best, and we proved them right,

the roosters, the charcoaled rabbits and owls.
The buy-six-and-save I bought five of —
how it calls out, how it longs for its ghost,

the corrugated empty slot. And since a pencil
should wait at the end of each reach of my hand,
you’re the sharp, the nubbed, the chiaroscuro rub.

Fine as italics, as free as the two-month trial
of the Times, so digital, you’re brimming, best brew
of coffee, bloom of first foam. Quick mix

of dry and wet, you’re the moment
soda and buttermilk meet. You’re morning
blazing the windows, long summer evening,

winter’s ice, warm as the hat I pull down
over my eyes and ears at night. Are you the cabin
we stayed in by the sea? The mystery I read all stormy day?

You’re so wonderful you didn’t even speak to me
till it got dark and I closed the book. Question is,
did I then, or ever, as you deserve, look up?

molly tenenbaum

Molly Tenenbaum is the author of four books of poems, most recently Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) and The Cupboard Artist (Floating Bridge, 2012). Her chapbook/artist book, Exercises to Free the Tongue (2014), a collaboration with artist Ellen Ziegler, combines poems with archival materials about ventriloquism. Her poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her recordings of old-time Appalachian banjo are Instead of a Pony and Goose & Gander. She lives in Seattle, teaching at North Seattle College and Dusty Strings Music School.

Headshot: Ellen Ziegler

Photo Credit: Staff