Poet’s Corner – Eve’s Complaints

Every year it’s something with the hose.

There was the year we started to unravel

it in early spring, and found a nest of impossibly

tiny mice and their startled mother,  She plucked

them one from the coils and ran into the grass,

not understanding our voices urging her to stay

as we watched helplessly from the porch where

we’d retreated.  There are years when the hose

is cracked, years we cannot remember which spigot

in the basement turns the water back on, years

 

where water leaks from a hundred invisible holes

like the hose’s practical joke.  Last year the hose

was put back hastily, careless work by the teenager

doing all the yard jobs when his father fell ill.  I finally

unspooled the long tangle, coaxing the snake of the hose

out like Eve in her forlorn garden while Adam was larking

about naming animals and boasting he was the first one.

Now, after all my struggles the water will not come.

Somewhere in the dark basement is a spigot I need

to locate.  I don’t know which one it is as we never

bothered to label it when we had the chance.