Microscopic

This morning

my memory serves Joan the potter

Rebecca’s mother

        her power as loud and soft

        as her thin-sliced sandwich bread

was dense and brittle

at Joan's

one delicious irony was

that we drank water and milk and apple juice

from cups made out of

plastic frozen oj concentrate containers

cut in half

we played Championship Baseball 

on Rebecca's Texas Instruments

after waiting

probably hours

for the game

to load

from a

cassette

tape

I think in the den

Rebecca had the Death Star

before anybody else

with the working elevator and trash compactor

rope swing

exploding laser cannon

a miniature miracle of plastic architecture

below us, in the part of the basement

where we rightly weren't allowed

scoring slipping shaping pinching throwing glazing

kicking throwing firing

the wheel and kiln and Joan

Tented hothouse

dental flopsweat

I spent a week in Canada 

the words can’t

just cupped close

how is this living

Gordon

would

not 

stand

for it

on either the Light

or dark

The smell of a peat fire isn’t my father's his is more fresh red leaf or cut grass or burning paint and selsun blue

but its crispness and Sunday morning austerity reminded me of Dad anyway, getting us lost

in an eastern european forest pulling over at the decaying hunting lodge of some eccentric archduke

I reanimate my coat

In the trash  the wind fills the empty bag a poor man’s dealership wind sock

on the bridge, that’s me and then there’s 

not a single owl left, but

there’s a basketball hoop  on the island, the last  one before Michigan

Black, won’t you come, why won’t you come come

In mid-flight, one thought up free whip  get go, and turned suddenly from his cohort  the two birds nearest him felt his absence, the pressure change. they didn’t look.

My parents had a floor lamp that was a pun on gooseneck, with a ceramic goose head shade

this was my stage microphone, and I did at least three, four hundred numbers 

the greatest solo hits of men of a certain age michael mcdonald and lou gramm and don henley

And the corner of the building marked Liberty and the emergency

Metaphors for a sad State of Affairs.

A public rest

room just used this is approximately the smell and feel

or when I poach sausages and the greasy water hasn’t quite boiled out. There’s a kind of last cynical undulation

that leaves at its edge the pork fat beginning to just burn.

We’re dwellers on this threshold like the Van Morrison song except toiling here is drudgery, dread.

We wait in vain for any Angel of Presence. Instead

a heavy set young white supremacist in a PBS story is voting for the first time.

Mean men we were, when first we tried to shed our skin, to tug it off over our sneakers, then back up, yanking in vain over our heads. No one had the heart to say: look here, can’t you see you’re sewn into that shroud?

Most of the time it’s the Donut sign  down the block, or the old trolley tracks  disappearing beneath the blacktop In slow moving traffic on the Belt I see an old coworker from the MTV days in the next car over, thinking, smoking

A Sienna full of Orthodox kids slides back taking her place, and there is the late orange of winter light, dusk-anxious

all the way to Pennsylvania my sons stare stone quiet, trusting, breathless, like I tend to be, and my father. I do believe

In the morning dim and dun we meet at the pear tree me and the korean grocer his spanish better than his english. my english is fixed due to our lack of books

the wind, drunk at night’s last call, is indecisive. that’s a word; here's that end of the world feeling we always talk about, the wanton violence. the debate

is eat the fruit or use the wood. pear will burn good but fruit is one sweet thing we still have two is my four stringed guitar, which is finished

That old man, he gave up can we just deadhead ourselves seized with sleep in a tulip chair drained from red to orange to pink