Each could picture probably
with great care his brother drawing
the corded string of a watered silk bag
and mumbling to Basho above the keepsake
pay your respects to mother's white hair
now your eyebrows look a little white too
but all have turned instead to watch this child
a girl my daughter Simone
an astute migrant
skimming the stream of days
toted wherever she wants
When I wake now it’ s below ocherous, saw-ridged
pine beams. Haze streaks all three windows. I look up
at the dog-eared, glossy magazine photo
I’ ve taken with me for years. It gets tacked
like a claim to some new wall in the next place —
Bill Russell & Wilt Chamberlain, one on one
the final game of the 1969 NBA championship,
two hard men snapped elbowing & snatching at a basketball
as if it were a moment one of them might stay inside
forever. I was with
my father the night that game played
Sunlight fades
the storefront full of magazines.
Month to month
they boss us — the covers,
they tell us
that if we want to get happy & alluring
(real happy, alluring sexually)
we must for goddamn sure
take up the breeding of Jack Russell terriers,
or else dig
ourselves
a little backyard fishpond.
Days of fish, days of dog, days of sex —
in that order, necessarily.
Now that everything seems so persuasive
you will go on changingas always
it has always been the case with you
whether you knew it or notever since
that morning in the swampthat Sunday
a sunless windy morningwhen
After his ham & cheese in the drape factory cafeteria,
having slipped by the bald shipping foreman
to ride a rattling elevator to the attic
where doves flicker into the massive eaves
and where piled boxes of out-of-style
cotton and lace won’t ever be
decorating anyone’s sun parlor windows.
Having dozed off in that hideout he fixed
between five four-by-six cardboard storage cartons
