HOUSE-SITTING FOR SHIVA

HOUSE-SITTING FOR SHIVA

I wake to a strange house, someone walking on the roof.
I wake to the garden where I have been introduced to the roses by name,
the owners have left me a plotted map
with watering schedule and instructions for new roses
versus the established roses
but no information that the electricians are coming in the morning.
Or the name of the cat or that the mail needs to be let in once a day too.
An electrician lets himself in by the front door, looking for the fuse box
Luckily I’m dressed, but asleep on the couch, he’s as surprised as I am.
He tells me there will be no power, this means no morning tea, no computer.
Yesterday’s heat wave has thrown the schedule asunder.
The northern sky is lonesome for the tropics
St. Kitts, said the other electrician, my home,
Are you far from home? He asks.
I’m all tangled up in answers, do I say where I’m raised, where I’ve lived,
versus where I live now and why I can’t seem to answer the question?

We think in terns of color, the roses are florid schools of fish.
Circe the nymph, shares a plot with Just Joy,
Mme Lombard is next to Tolouse Lautrec
and Alliance de Franco Russe is next to the Peace rose
Gloire & Eglantine, Mrs Choux, and Aloha all by herself in a corner
I find Charles de Gaulle in the same bed with the Tipsy Imperial Concubine
I imagine a collective lovers knot of roses under the rich loam
I follow the map, watering each rose, avoiding down power lines
suspended from the pole by a yellow line tied to the roof—
as if the house were a boat anchored to a mooring line
snug in a harbor of crabgrass sea.
When the watering is done and it comes time to pick some roses for my class
I forget the eminent danger of water lines and high voltage lines intersecting
though the hose and extension cords are crossed in fated lovers’ knots
I forget the possibility of electrocution greeting me
by traveling up the silver highway of water to the hose, will it save me?
Should the lines cross, the intersection of an improbable death
I forget my plans to run away from the trajectory of the line
and the yellow rope, should it break
My plans to avoid imagined deaths are dismantled as I flit from bloom to bloom
with shears in hand gathering heaps of roses
of every description and name
nearly 150 varieties to tantalize and entrance
their heady odor, narcotic, I’m like the cat, stoned,
staggering from each imagined heaven to another
oblivious to the hordes gathered around cars
with rap vibrating the cars like a gale against sail lines
bowline, jib line, another line until I get to the radishes
with their rosy spanked bottoms peeking out of green petticoats
Sometimes I still dream he comes in the night to put his arms around me
I play succubus to his incubus, and open like a rose
only to awaken to a confused history of decades slipping upstream
under the bridge, catching me off guard
finding me in sleep unfaithful to my mate
the exponential dance of cumulative lovers has not corrupted that dance
but old habits die hard, like all the rest.
In the infidelity of sleep, we are all infidels.

2004