Fancy People

1.

My mother told the story of 

her own mother's boss, Mrs. Wendt,

who sometimes visited the farm, 

and all four sisters would be dispatched to clean 

within an inch of their lives to prepare.

They dusted and polished the few pieces of silver 

and the pale array of stray China plates and cups,

knowing the fancy lady and her Mister would soon arrive

and look down their half-

glasses to judge the home and land. 

"Oh, Al, smell the oats," Mrs. Wendt would intone, 

and the sisters would smother a laugh among them, 

for it was wheat and corn that grew in their fields. 

I gather that the family imagined the perfumed habitat

of the couple from the city and compared that likely expanse

with its vast array of windows streaming sunlight in throughout 

a living room that likely gleamed even beyond fresh sunlight, 

different from their own small home situated among 

naturally fragrant growing things. 

2. 

Years beyond those days, some high school guy

from a swanky boys' academy invited me to his prom, 

and my mother put on the dog to impress him 

as she had been taught. He arrived with his parents 

to ferry me off to the dance, wearing his thick wool uniform

that I noticed during his clasping me while we danced

smelled like perspiration. With that scent 

came his sense that I should be grateful for his swirling me

around the dance floor in his arms. I felt myself

push away from this ludicrous thug whose kiss

felt like drudgery. I could not wait

to return home to my poetry and privacy, 

even more than I had during so many of those requisite dates.

3.

Only recently, some now distant relations

madly in love with their own good fortune visited us here

in my adult home and emitted that familiar vibration,

appearing to assume we would want to do anything to please

these overlords of acquired wealth that they believed excused 

the tedium of their repeatedly rehashing old tales

that from the first had been dreary lost nearly immediately

whatever hope of spark such repetition might devise. 

We had tried to meet them where they were.

That intergenerational reflex of trying too hard

to please those who deserved less than our hospitality 

tainted and stained even my soul, and I suppose 

what love they thought they brought would always be 

conditional, despite my routine reflex resembling 

the jolt after a tap on the knee, 

to embrace an ill-conceived naive lifelong dream.