Two Poems

What She Called the Blood Jet

The cabinet of love has only two doors,
in and out. There are four rooms.
In the first, screw top bottles and foil strips
hold brilliantly coloured answers.
The second holds something French
to do with herbs and truffle.
The third has the memory of childhood
and here, last of all, like mica, like mercury,
lies the present. It is a muscle. It is meat.

Familiar Object Seen from an Unusual Angle

Maybe it's the surface of the moon, pocky as rind, foreign,
or rain, on the beaches of childhood,
making holes in the sand, the 007 kind, splashy,

or the cross-hatched stars on your hand growing older,
or the real things, sparking still, as they cool,
it's how they twinkle, how we wonder what they are.

Maura Dooley