Cleaning Up after the Year of the Snake Parade, 1965

Yesterday skitters, still in its husk, beneath a boardwalk on The Embarcadero.
Someone leers; prods at with stick; pours Du Kang on; places ear to; buries 
in snow.  Every day hereafter will return, just this way, for those
who needed more: rent, jumper cables, two phone calls from Albany.  Instead
it's 1964, December, and someone's strung a bedroom with fairy lights
and thrown the packing tape in a corner, on the last day of the month 
and the year, the white year, which buried itself in a hillock 
to sleep like a troll—growling its dreams, grasping at women hand over hand
to hold tightly as dolls or sandbags, stolid and noncommittal.  Instead
of walking on our elbows, playing rounds of rummy by flashlight
and sharing tongues and fevers, it's this day we get: the things we still believe
about ourselves, and will take in boxes down the holes we go, lights before
and behind, maybe friends and maybe lovers, maybe a gray hand pinching 
at ankles and toes, testing us muscle to speck, as we go crawling toward 
            
          
          
     
our return: at a phone booth, in a snowdrift, listening.

 

© Seth Abramson