We come East again, but this time leave you behind
to join us in a week for the beach piece. I fill time
taking the boys to Lincoln’s lap, and a DC city pool, where
they hold their own, elbows and knees, with the laughing
black kids, playing Marco Polo, diving for a torn goggles’ strap.
Two days later we wander a vast strutted cavern crammed
with the spent super-toys of a spent super-nation:
Black Bird, Discovery, Enola Gay. Then we head north.
Driving towards it on roller coaster roads, the younger one
says he can smell my brother’s farm, meaning some tumbler
turns in this kid’s wild heart from my life as a kid: thick summer
crunching into color come Fall. And he being born across the country
in a city awed by mountains; and the other one grunting
his blue naked way into a megalopolis once awed only by itself,
but hushed, over the months he grew alive inside you, by towers
of anguished empty light. I can’t help but be grateful something rises
in these two to this air which smothered my blood for so long, even
when the older boy barfs a mile shy of the farm, and I have to pull
over to sluice the puke from the plastic bag into a corn field.
That night I drink with my brother in a country bar not completely
different from the one we grew up in as stock boys, though this
one feels like the future: fluorescent and empty, safer and ugly.
He preaches to me, sipping whiskey from a cup made for cough syrup,
how my work needs to change the world in a big way for the better; but
I deflect him with my best Mother Teresa: We can do no great things,
only small things with great love. And I half-believe it, too.
Two days later, coming on midnight, the kids crashed in
their grandmom’s living room, my niece and my boys,
gunshot-sprawled across the sofa and blown-up air mattress.
Me stretched on a futon in my Mom’s extra room calculating
days till you join us, thoughts finally weirding into dreams
when a quiet note chimes and the phone purrs vibration.
Glowing at my touch a text, a picture, makes no sense at first
but then I see them: full and perfect, nipples piqued:
“The girls miss you.”
The bonfire my brother builds the next night back at the farm
seems hopeless at first after that day’s thunderstorms, but
my brother doesn’t truck in hope, never has. He works at it.
Big things for the better make a life worth living, and a few flashes
of gasoline will burn the dampness from the ground, such that
careful application of kindling brings, within half an hour, an inferno
roaring higher than anything we dare encourage in the tinderbox West.
Hunks of smoldering float above the trees, open letters to parts of the world
where hope still waits for gasoline and my brother’s good intentions.
Let this Mason-Dixon humidness set free what, two nights ago,
your dry Seattle skies took up, radio riddling the ether (though
there is no ether: turns out there’s no need.) Let them hum to me
an image (though there is no hum: photons keep mum till we
teach them to speak) joyful, girly gift to thrill me, and feed,
as I grow old and older, my sulking need— when I can’t have
you when I want you, and I think it’s your fault.
If that’s not a child’s heart, whose is?
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so fills herself up with all this us.
Time hates a naked singularity: and so everything is just nothing
wearing knickers. These are the laws, described by men as blind
as me; yet somehow you flaunt them. With a chime and a purr
and a gleam you give, playfully, teasingly, everything; but also
somehow hold so much more back; because you know the truth
is never naked enough, and neither are you.
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