“Stewarding the Succulents,” “Purple Cabbage,” and “The Sum Over Histories” 

The houseleeks need a midwife

sometimes, their cabbage-babies

breaching, the stolon-cord refusing

to break. I don't perform Caesareans;

I merely wiggle a baby foot; help

it make contact with the rocky earth.

Mornings I walk, archaeologist

brush in hand, and sweep a margin

around each sempervivum

mum-to-be to give her future

offspring a flatter place to land.

No miracle worker, I have been known

to bury hens and chicks when planting

companions, those glittering ice plants−

gem-studded rock garden prom queens−

and have to dig the scalloped minions

out to bask in peace on sun-stunned stones.

My thumbs and eyes and feet converge

to provide relief; no quid pro quo

demands for appreciation, faith, belief.

I like the fragrance of your cooking:

browning meats and mellow spice,

while I watch TV or read, but

not so much the unsightly sight

or cacophonous chaos,

so many dirtied pots.

It's like you try to be disorganized,

but why would a person? Sometimes

you use every spoon in the kitchen

on one dish. How is that even possible?

If it were me, I'd wash as I went, everything

ending up cleaner than ever before. I’d chop

onions like a machine, the right tool for the job.

Yet I often love the taste of your meals.

I’ll ask you...was that... difficult? Gauging the value

of the transaction. And you shake purple cabbage

from your hair and say, no, you’re used to it.

I could have gone another way

if I’d gotten the Reference Desk

work-study job at Olin Library

at Washington University in St. Louis.

Think it over and let us know

by Wednesday and I came

back Tuesday but the other guy

had come back on Monday

and got the job. You were both

perfectly adequate, she said.

Clotho was the Fate who wove

probability amplitudes, a wave

function, a Schrödinger’s cat.

I'd heard about birds and worms

and first come, first served, but

I thought they were just sayings;

nothing to do with me, who

didn't want to seem too eager;

born six weeks early, but my parents

had been married 15 years.

Wash U was 70% men back

then, and at the Reference

Desk I'd have helped so many

of them. Some would

have been irresistible.

Eventually, one would have rescued

me from the rest. Eventually, he'd have wanted

kids and figured out I didn't, long before I did.

Instead, I married R. Took me three weeks

to accept his proposal−so slow−and married

at 20, so fast. Divorced after 11 years−long

for a starter marriage, but young enough

to start over. Physics says the future determines

the past−retrocausality−demoting Clotho to a Psychic Reader

in a walk-up over a bodega,

but she and I suspect

that character is fate.