Chinoisserie

My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol

on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold-

throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket,

held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slots.

Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed

by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr,

that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns.

Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where

our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed,

where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter

of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast

grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones

and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said,

to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein:

the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk

of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily.

Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic

rinse over us—impractical and non-negotiable.

Source: The Dig (University of Illinois Press, 1992)