Marilyn McCabe
THINGS SHAPED BY WHAT CONTAINS THEM
cranberry sauce that gloops out
can-shaped and scored, and pea soup
too, that Campbell's kind, olive drab,
a chicken from an egg, wide bottomed
and bobbly, those L'Eggs pantyhose
eggwadded, that unwashed after two shifts
at Ho Jos will still contain my calves,
the wind that curled in my inner ear
hums loops, and the tumbleweed
Marty shipped me one Christmas
squared by the box for fifteen years
apartment to apartment fading gray
with piling dust until that place
too compact for a tumbleweed and me
up under the eaves under the sky
where I became for a time roof-shaped
like a witch's hat, like the vees
of all those geese leaving
until I broke out and became window
glass, rectangular in shape but
amorphous in form, somewhat
unsolid, slightly disorganized,
but elastic and retaining, as it turns out,
bubbles and waves of the initial pour,
like liquid, but not.