— For Suzanne Cleary

The time I didn’t know what to do next
I arranged my furniture in the little frame house

that sagged in the middle like an ark—
just three pieces really: a mattress, chair,

and desk made from a filing cabinet,
an old door, and some concrete blocks.

One stoplight town, diploma in hand, my bosses
instructed me to start the revolution, empower

the poor. I possessed no more than numbers
and facts, such as the pregnancy rate

for teenagers and median age, high, income,
low, for the place I now called home.

I knew no one. The neighbor who topped
and suckered tobacco for a dollar an hour

or his wife who made bologna bacon, bologna pie
and stew from surplus food, laughed in her kitchen,

This surplus cheese is good. Take some
peanut butter and mix the two together.

Her can-do cooking blew my must-do master
plans out the window—newspaper stories,

five year schemes, and charts and graphs,
the kind that lined our family business walls.

I called my father to say how helpless I felt,
he clicked his tongue, the sound of one hand clapping.

In the telephone booth, it was just the hiss of the line,
an encouraging “Goodbye,” then the sound of wind

across tobacco fields and nearer,
blowing through bean vines. I didn’t know

what to do next, so I did next to nothing
except sit in the kitchen and listen.