JUPITER STANDING STILL

    by Bates Corlieu

“Ordinary thumb-suck dreams, Miss Brooks”   was scrawled across the page
But...   the man that unfolded himself and carried two roomfuls of cabinets over his head
that turned into one slender mirror reflecting the rainline down the street
and that rain moving until I had to peel my soaked poem off the table
made it seem so important
                                                                                   
And you kept moving the class across town because so many Grandmothers had died     
          in the night
that we rattled around like orphans in the pall of the big frame house
smelling of cedar and old clothes piled on armchairs like doilies
and the ragged right hand margin
made it all seem so real