You'd bully on leggings and galoshes.
I'd kick and yank them off.

Instead of making me a lunch
you practice Fantasy Impromptu.

On the way to school my red ears
heard you baning the black keys.

In the lunchroom someone muttered:
"She has no lunch again."

I gagged on a nickel bottle of watery
milk with a glob of cream at the neck
where a noose would go.

When I defied your curfews,
We flailed at each other's faces.
Two teakettles shrieking with steam.

Some nights it was quiet in the living room.
We took turns reading from your poem
"The Ghosts' and Goblins' Ball."

Near the end I went to you. I wore a purple scarf,
For a decade your mind spooked by tumbleweed,
this hour you found some rest.

Your eyes teared, met mine and never wavered.
Your lips moved as if in earnest conversation,
softened into hints of smiles.

I told you "How beautiful you are!"
large brown eyes, coarse white curls,
even the Roman nose you bemoaned.

How your poems were my sinew, muscle to bone:

...The wind furnished music in minor off key,
through a crack in the old barn door,
...and the ghosts started waltzing
and slow somersaulting
without ever touching the floor...