Embarkations (2)

Autumn '87

"Business, like a yet-emerging
fiction."  "Flowering prophecies
her priest saw through."  Then
"this other loveliness, tugged
at by schoolkids, in Vermont snow,
her Lutheran singing
and my Catholic own, and this
recovered house, ourselves
as grandparents, wrinkling among
their ancestors and grandchildren.
Maybe I've got 10 years, a piece
of the fading longhand in the tablets,
have got, with this, (the Wahl
I might have chucked, the still-flexible
nib and green-bronze
marble of the holder,) the man-feel
of those dangerous, more-gentle
seasons.  The slit gold flexes, glides
the buff Angler's page,
a half-century and more for it, sold
cheap to clear out stock
at the heart of the Depression.  And I
listen to kids' play, to
fingerings of tunes we talked up
weeks before we bought them, light
accompanying teased scales yet,
of Love withstanding Love's collapse,
and the 2 of us, sloshing the incline
home on Bancroft, having carfare
splurged to share a century-wide
Christmas.  I feel the decade's inquiry
ahead.  Among the wood
and leathers, rainbow bindings
of the study, I feel our kindly luck,
in these rooms almost abandoned
to the booze and mizzled business,
two, grown dumb in their first Love,
as the sky deepens, above
the race of traffic south, and two,
like enduring, last drafts
on an accent, spotting the snow's
mad circling over the gas
and meal -stops.

I feel the decades' pulse in us.

(Brown squints, his loupe in place,
frowning to redress
the match of gravity
and hardboard, putting
the nib straight.)

Cheered even by the grind
as galaxies go round,
our fingers find their ways by choice,
cheered on by the brush
of lampchain over lamp brass,
gathering long Love.
Let the hearts of space break down
to lesser plastics.
Let these unsettling accelerations
at season's end,
(the cheat trucks, grinding midnight
blue and midnight
brightening,) restore that world to us,
restore to us this gaze,
these last-century faces, against
the dissonance,
enlivening the ceiling tablets
or staking homes
along the baseboards, and let
these radiant kids
our long-acquainted lust has marveled up
perform in place
against the next century's erasures,
ourselves the breathing,
inches off their elbows,
exciting instinct there,
turning the pages,
keeping score."

 

© Appetite (2)