The pasta water’s on the boil — have some wine

Ritual

• Ritual is firm where life is fickle,
• Steps in, hands us formula for hurt,
• Things to do: cross ourselves, stand, bow.
• There are no words, we protest, but somehow
• Ritual instructs us what to say;
• Ritual puts one foot before the other,
• Addresses wife-made-widow, daughter, brother.
• Even at the grave, the coffin lowered,
• We have a little chore, a fist of dirt
• That tattles on the lid, a gesture toward
• Real work of burial. And then the group
• Drives down the mountain to the brisk cafe
• Where tradition serves the living: bread and pickle,
• Brandy, bitter coffee, and fish soup.

Granddaddy’s pitch pipe

From the Museum of Obsolete Objects

• Black battered flying saucer, prop for a film
• In black and white on half-seen wire suspended,
• With curious vents, or bays, all round, for sortie
• By hostile crafts, or drafts, and all defended
• By symbols, as on the Phaestos disk — with flat
• And sharp, and clef, a quartered alphabet,
• Weird round harmonica, metallic, slim,
• And still true, over time, to A 440.

• I used to keep it in the fiddle’s case
• (A fiddle in his case), that velvet-lined
• Black box heavier than its contents, place
• To lay the frail, aged instrument, where I’d find
• The brittle crumbs of resin, an empty chest.
• (In music, too, they call the silence rest.)

The Arsenic Hour

• (Google it)
• The pasta water’s on the boil, and I’m
• Trying to keep the lid on — have some wine,
• I tell myself. Now is when baths are drawn
• Like battle-lines, when long-division, fraught
• With faux newfangled-ness, must be retaught,
• Relearned, resentment for the dividends —
• Quotients, remainders — after all, what’s time
• But long division? Twenty-fours and twelves,
• Sixties, sevens, three-hundred sixty-fives,
• Fractions in which we parcel our prime selves.
• The phone call is impossible, my friends!
• Now is the husbandry that falls to wives,
• Wrestling the insurgence off to sleep,
• The chore that never ends, until it ends,
• The work of days, the work that will not keep.

A. E. Stallings is an American poet who lives in Greece. A MacArthur Fellow, her most recent collection is Olives (Northwestern University Press).