Responsibility triptych (topic chosen by my sister, to amend three days of missing posts)

I.

Two cups of sugar

Exactly three teaspoons of oil

Orange peel thinly sliced

Recipes skipped are plagued

With limpid failure.

Sticks of butter

Sweet pickles sorted out

Responsibility

Which plate needs to be filled

With pastry, protection.

II.

Train track switcher

Timed and perfect

With gloved hands built

Spreading tar and busting nails

Supple strong, and used.

These are the imagined hands

Of an imagined man.

III.

My to-do list is not epic:

It involves calling the plumber,

Emailing the insurance man,

And taking the dog for a pee before work.

A domestic paper trail is dull.

However, Ed the Plumber

Recently had a baby, a girl.

And he remarked on how my mother

Got a bang for her buck when she bought our

Dishwasher before I was born.  His

Bag of tools is old, a chrome flashlight

Resting precariously on top. His brother

Came over and helped me move a dresser

Up three flights of stairs when I was alone

In the house and everything was dusty and

Hopeless and my hair was covered in plaster. 

One night my stepmother and I had to bail out the kitchen

When a pipe burst -we ran those bowl fulls

Out the back the door like a fire line and it was the first time I really laughed

With her.  Ed looks at the crusty tiles in the third floor bathroom, a swell like

pregnancy, a balloon of tap water tapped from the street or wherever tap

Water comes from    a pump? Some sort of pump underneath the sidewalk like a mechanical heart beating? Each sewer like a tunnel a whole cityscape contained, ticking. And ticking.