Miss Drake Proceeds To Supper

No novice

In those elaborate rituals

Which allay the malice

Of knotted table and crooked chair,

The new woman in the ward

Wears purple, steps carefully

Among her secret combinations of eggshells

And breakable hummingbirds,

Footing sallow as a mouse

Between the cabbage-roses

Which are slowly opening their furred petals

To devour and drag her down

Into the carpet's design.

With bid-quick eyed cocked askew

She can see in the nick of time

How perilous needles grain the floorboards

And outwit their brambled plan;

Now through her ambushed air,

Adazzle with bright shards

Of broken glass,

She edges with wary breath,

Fending off jag and tooth,

Until, turning sideways,

She lifts one webbed foot after the other

Into the still, sultry weather

Of the patients' dining room.