The Long Island School
for Dore Ashton

Underground,
(below her mother's cubist house
which wedged itself within skewed hedges,
so overgrown, so wild that their right angles were all but lost)
the art teacher told the children to forget what is real.

The bathroom in her mother's house
was big enough for a horse to enter easily
(after clattering up the central stairs built from solid oak)
and then die after first arranging itself in the tub.
'What's new?' her mother would ask and they told her. The tub, the death.

Her mother's shambled house
(left over from an ideal childhood on Long Island)
was perfect with its sprawling basement, porcelain laundry tubs,
rumbling furnace, fuse boxes, ice skates, boots and sleds.
...