There Is The Children's Miscellany Under Glass

there is the children's miscellany under glass

the chocolate eclairs and lady fingers creamed

at the bakery across time in the elegant striped paper sack.

contained is the miniscule snowstorm

glazed on the baby doughnuts.

I wander through old book reports

watching the dolls behave in odd pink silk

or bon-bon pastel fresh

in every sheen or sunrise

of an antique cradle, oversized.

I want to buy new parasols

from the paintings of Monet

in the scarlet meadows

 under summer skies

am I too late? for the hand-print in plaster of

Paris you hung on the lavender wall.

oh, I'm still small.

the door bell chimes

and I am in.

a pound of lemon drops, I dream,

Three Musketeers

but cannot say to the ghosts minding the store;

a dress embroidered with roses or a sky in a white

cardboard box with gold flecked tissue paper

or a hill I used to know and watched the others

go down it may be or was this imagined: glossy

magazine picture-perfect, scissored;rainy day pasted

with a thick brush into a brown paper scrapbook just

facing the page with postcards from the universe

tinted in spectral vermillion, aqua, peach and green.

hair ribbons to match

o my dear

not crated yet; on the corner table:

among dainty things

one fan of paper poppies splashed beside the

piano grand creased ivories

of a music, Grandmother, I

have not forgotten; on a February day

the peach ice cream homemade,

cranked up to such exhilaration or

we're drinking colas down a dusk-lit road

(deep summer, now)

straight from the suburb wonderland we lived in

revisiting the farm of near relatives or snow-coned in-

near dark green lakes

and I am glassed in still in my mid-winters holding on

each time the music box replays my

sense of the golden turning or spearmint, blue grass tipped

with notes of the gardenia, sweet-pea nosegays from some past your

old perfumes unstoppered...we tried every one

while you were teaching piano

in the studio off the living room

and we were home from school at 3:20 reveling,

sprigged in the freshness of the folded linen the

clove pomanders the magnolia intensities

brought indoors to compensate the soul in cool

beauty reverenced quietly or enamoured of the yellow glass

candy jar hard candy beribboned, raspberry, orange

at the center of the Sun, the  lollipop one,

olde fairytales placed end to end 

will gild the orbit of something

in the word problems

I'm still practicing

and can't be done with ever

mary angela douglas 4 february 2014;revised, 7 february 2014