Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
went down to the river to bathe.
Adam and Eve got drowneded
and who do you think got saved?

My father's bootlegger has just driven up
from Camden with a case of Cutty Sark
for the demon whiskey lovers.
My uncles move in upstairs with their beebee guns.
They're out of work.
God has a peephole even under the covers.
Squirrels fall at first light out of the pin oaks.
My brothers, short-pants man to man,
tie them in knots like old socks
and salt them away in the garbage can.
I'm the squirrel girl.
After everyone leaves for school or town
I sneak the poor burst darlings down
to the garden bed for a burial.

On the way back, muddy, I stop for a drink
at the kitchen faucet, wash up, hear
the amber bottles whistle through me clear
as scatter shot, then do
what the Almighty tells me to:
I pour my daddy's whiskey down the sink.

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Tight
went to the movies one dark night.
Adam and Eve had an ice-cream cone
and who do you think got lost coming home?

Now I am ten. Enter Mamselle,
my mother's cut-rate milliner.
She is putting her sore eyes out in the hall
at thirty cents an hour
tacking veils onto felt forms.
Mamselle is an artist.
She can copy the Eiffel Tower
in feathers with a rolled-up brim.
She can make pyramids out of cherries.
Mamselle wears cheese boxes on her feet.
Madame can buy and sell her.
If daughters were traded among the accessories
in the perfumed hush of Bonwit Teller's
she'd have replaced me with a pocketbook,
snapped me shut and looped me over
her Hudson seal cuff, me of the chrome-wire mouth,
the inkpot braids, one eye that looks
wrongly across at the other.
O Lady of the Chaise Longue,
o Queen of the Kimono,
I disappoint my mother.

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Flat
went to the push-nickel automat.
Adam and Eve had nickels to spend
but who do you think got left in the end?

Two more years of Kaltenborn's reports
and Poland will fall, the hearts
of horses will burst in a battle with tanks.
Soon enough the uncles will give thanks
for GI uniforms to choose
and go off tough as terriers to dig their holes.
Warsaw will excrete its last Jews.

My father will cry like a child.
He will knuckle his eyes, to my terror,
over the letters that come from the grave
begging to be sponsored, plucked up, saved.
I hoard tinfoil, meanwhile.
I knit for Britain's warriors.
This is the year that my mother stiffens.
She undresses in the closet giving me
her back as if I can't see
her breasts fall down like pufferfish,
the life gone out of their crusty eyes.
But who has punctured the bathroom light?
Why does the mattress moan at night
and why is nothing good
said of all the business to come
--the elastic belt with its metal tongue--
when my body, that surprise,
claps me into my first blood?

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Dead
coasted down Strawberry Hill on a sled.
Adam and Eve fell off in the mud
but who do you think got covered with blood?