1.
Tablecloth I vaguely
remember from the table
on the porch
at my parents’ last
house, where
we had dinner—I find
it in my father’s
retirement apartment
cupboard,
folded, laundered,
white muslin
with stylized
primroses,
columbine,
day lily;
blue-purple hepatica,
clematis, monkey flower,
all connected with
serpentine
green stems and
leaves.
2.
Command the
tablecloth: “Turn
inside out!” It
rises and
twists, “as if it were
in a whirlwind,”
comes down
neatly upon the table,
laden “with dishes and
plates and wooden
spoons with
pictures on them,
and bowls of
soup and
mushrooms
and kasha, and meat and
cakes and fish
and
ducks, and everything
else you can think
of.” Old Peter’s
Russian tale: “The Stolen
Turnips, the Magic
Tablecloth, the
Sneezing Goat, and the
Wooden Whistle.”
3.
My daughter disappears,
then reappears
in a sheer
blue paisley
tablecloth—no,
handkerchief—skirt. She’s
waltzing across
the retirement
high rise parking
lot in high heels
and this short, pointy-
hemmed, gauzy
thing. She
says she
only wears
it with family, or
her boyfriend,
yet here she is
sashaying
in full view of
hundreds
of retirees’
windows. I say
I can’t stand that
you’re leaving. You will
be here, today,
and today
and today—and then,
blank.
4.
To make a salt
shaker disappear, put it
in a folded
napkin, place a
coin beneath
it. Lift shaker
and napkin;
the coin
remains. Replace
shaker and
napkin; strike napkin
with your fist—it
collapses—the salt
shaker is gone.
Magician
produces it from
inside his vest
pocket.
5.
The skirt had a
light and dark
blue alternating
pattern. And a wide
black elasticized
“waistband” that
she’d shoved
down over
her hips.
6.
The seven principles
of légèreté des mains;
aka, prestidigitation,
sleight of hand: palm, ditch,
steal, load,
simulation, misdirection,
and switch. In this trick,
numbers two, four
and six.
7.
Abundance, blank,
abundance.
When she
came home for the
summer, masses
of red and blue speckled
Mexican pasta beads
around her
tanned neck, her fashion
jeans in the
airport, my
life started again,
humming,
engaging
the cylinders.
8.
How the salt
shaker trick is done:
The magician knocks
it into his lap
when looking at
the coin,
retains the shape of it
in the napkin (number
two: ditch)
while getting everyone to
stare at the
irrelevant
coin (indirection,
number six.) Somehow
he wiggles it up into
his inside
vest pocket (load) for
the climactic
moment.
Eureka! Abundance,
blank,
abundance.
9.
My mother
appeared,
disappeared. You could
find her at 9 a.m.
and again
at 6 p.m., in all
kinds of weather, with her
dog, Tori, by the
water. She could
be charming. Charisma
that came and
went, box
with a false
bottom (simulation),
revolving
door.
10.
I take the
tablecloth that I vaguely
remember
from the table on
the porch
where we had those
superb dinners
my mother would make—
wild rice
salad with black
olives, halved
green grapes,
and slivered
almonds; sliced tomatoes
from the garden;
basil; and whatever fleshy
white fish
was in season—and feel
no fear
spreading it on our formica
rental table. I ask my
father
if I can keep
the tablecloth—
I want to spread
it around
my tables at
home. I want
to exult in my
power over
the tablecloth.
11.
Meanwhile
my daughter
gets more and more
shall we say
exuberant
getting ready
to leave. I’m nineteen,
she says, I think
we can go to
seeing each other once
a year now.
12.
“‘Tablecloth, turn
outside in.’ Up jumps
the tablecloth
with all the empty dishes and
dirty plates
and spoons, whirls
itself this way and that
in the air, and suddenly
spreads itself
out flat again
on the table, as
clean and white as when it was
taken out
of the cupboard. There
is not a
dish or a bowl, or a
spoon or a plate,
or a knife to
be seen; no
not even a
crumb.”
13.
Flip, bipolar,
I have
some pictures of
those dinners. The faded
red trumpet vine, the
morning glories.
Hummingbirds
in the tall pink
foxgloves, at the window
feeder at
sundown. My children
with birthday ribbons
in their hair, those
flash-struck
looks, the presents
and the perfect
House Beautiful presentation—
the hovering
presentiment of what
my mother might say.
14.
The ditch, the
switch,
flexible or
bipolar. My mother,
absent. My
mother, everywhere
present. My mother
kind and
generous, my mother . . . .
The goldfinch, yellow
oriole. Bluebird or indigo
bunting.
Dana Roeser’s fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and was published in September 2019. She is also the author of The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, recipient of the Juniper Prize, as well as Beautiful Motion and In the Truth Room, both winners of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. Among her many awards and honors are the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and numerous residencies in the U.S. and abroad. She has read her work widely and taught in the MFA programs in poetry at Purdue, Butler, and Wichita State Universities. Recent poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Pushcart Prize XLIII, Crazyhorse, Laurel Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry, Diode, and Notre Dame Review. For more about Dana Roeser, please see www.danaroeser.com.