Two Poems by Jane Zwart
/Why We Can Not Get a Dog
1.
My son, who wants a pet, drops objects
he no longer needs wherever they outlive
their use. He leaves the door open.
I tell him a pet would eat his socks.
I tell him I cannot chase another
living thing. He asks for a slice of bread.
2.
My son traps an ant. He crushes
the creature some in the capture
without intending to. He says
My pet was too fast for me when we met.
His pet lives in strange splendor,
domesticated to a clamshell, a plastic
greenhouse; to water in a Skippy lid
and wrung hydrangeas, a bread mattress
on the floor. I praise the ingenuity. I praise
the paraplegic ant. I pat its shoe-shine thorax.
3.
My son, who has ground the life
from many bugs, like a gangster
tap-dancing on Lucky Strikes; my son,
who scuffs through the hourglass heaps
of sand in the driveway’s seams—
how he cries when the pismire dies.
All night he is morose, dosed with loss.
A little love is a dangerous thing.
Ode to Wickedness
O, poison-apple queen, archer
of eyebrow, steepler of hands,
how sorry my arsenal: trochees
and burs, letter openers pulled
without flourish from plastic
sheathes. O, Wickedness, sin
in a catsuit, your sidekick is
a clumsy mimic. Mine are all
pitiable, lickspittle spites.
How blurry my envy, O, candied
evil; how humdrum my crimes.
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines.
