1.
Your soup spoon in midair, you turn your head
the better to hear a conversation,
its rise and fall, calm and consternation,
from a back table across the crowded
restaurant. Here I carefully butter
a croissant. Half-deaf, you can’t catch the words
but savor the tone—you the one who reads
Boole’s classic The Laws of Thought for pleasure,
Dover Edition—On which are founded
the Mathematical Theories
of Logic and Probabilities—
reading unabashedly only words,
slighting each algebraic equation
as nothing but scandalous evasion.
2.
Because Indian Summer doubled back,
we go to the trailer for a few days,
turn on the water up by the highway,
sweep out the grasshopper legs and mouse tracks
dividing our boxes of field rations
between the rodent-proof dishwasher
and the rattletrap refrigerator.
God bless rural electrification
for all the years your Aunt Reva lived here
alone. Now it’s come down to the nephew
who could meet expenses and wanted to.
This place doesn’t yield a thing but taxes,
sweet-smelling cedar, tall prairie grasses,
sufficient room for the ghosts,
and you, my dear.
Copyright © 2007 Jannett Highfill. All rights reserved.