Playing The Numbers

My aunt believes

in the accountability of dreams -

in the shape of number,

the color, the direction

of winning combinations -

yet with no knack at all

for interpretation.

She lives down a dark

hallway, over mud-streaked, dank

mosaics; on the walls

the creamic patterns throb

and dissolve in the gloom.

She has a good heart, my mother

says, and sleeps in a double

bed with two of my cousins,

and whines.

My uncle,

in another room, sleeps alone,

and smokes a cigar

in his undershirt, and smiles,

breathing the clear, heavy

rhythms of his steady job.

Smoke and tea-brown saliva

trickle out of his mouth and cloud

over, swirling, and stain

his fat shining cheeks

and belly, and the oracular

tight skin of his head.

Three dark

flights upstairs, my aunt's one

intimate presses her dream

book deep into the wheezing seas

of her flesh and there, like a streak

of sunlight piercing murky

seaweed or speakeasy smoke

that bubbles up from the green

hookahs, still dances, and wavers,

and quivers, and a balalaika

tongues still her glassy wrists

and thighs. All fear

her sour grimace, and her evil

eye that penetrates the dark

arithmetic of dreams and casts

now its irrefragable spell

over a simple heart, my aunt's,

that obedient daughter, even

on her wedding night, that

violated, finally, the silence

of her portly, dapper, cigar-chewing

man and revealed in the blood,

and the sulking, and the recriminations,

a painful and gross illiterate

in letters and in love.

From Playing the Numbers, University of North Dakota Press (1986).