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Poems by Stanley Plumly My Mother’s Feet How no shoe fit them, and how she used to prop them, having dressed for bed, letting the fire in the coal-stove blue and blink out, falling asleep in her chair. How she bathed and dried them, night after night, and rubbed their soreness like an intimacy. How she let the fire pull her soft body through them. She was the girl who grew just standing, the one the picture cut at the knees. She was the girl who seemed to be dancing out on the lawn, after supper, alone. I have watched her climb the militant stairs and down again, watched the ground go out from under her. I have felt her on the edge of chances— she fell, when she fell, like a girl. Someone who loved her said she walked on water. Where there is no path nor wake. As a child I would rise in the half-dark of the house, from a bad dream or a noisy window, something, almost, like snow in the air, and wander until I could find those feet, propped and warm as a bricklayer’s hands, every step of the way shining out of them. Blossom And after a while he’d say his head was a rose, a big beautiful rose, and he was going to blow it all over the room, he was going to blast blood. And after a while he’d just put his head in his one good hand the way children do who want to go into hiding. I still can’t get the smell of smoke from a woodstove out of my head. A woman is frying bacon and the odor is char and sour and somebody running a finger over your tongue. All those dead years and the grease still glue on the wall. In Winchester, Virginia, the year the war ended, the blacks were still dark clouds. My uncle had a knife pulled on him holding his nose. When the Guard marched eleven German prisoners of war down from Washington they marched them right through town, and it was spring and a parade like apple blossom. Black and white, we lined up just to watch. I still can’