"thoughts revisted while pissing in an alley"
A trench coat of sky
dotted by snow-salt stars,
if only from the balcony
that defines possibility – streets and lights –
the way a can of Beefaroni
fits the pantry boy’s hand. The way a machine
can define a paycheck in terms of clicks and clacks against a page:
a hillside
turns dollar green and my daughter
runs through the pines. Runs without
syntactic meaning or a jacket or –
there was a fellow by the corner,
whose face rounded
like the face of a clock and his tongue
ticked as he walked a sidewalk
trashed by soda cans and calendar pages.
The steps of an hour hand?
How many stairs did I climb
to look down
from a hallway window, to carouse
with an empty can or a thought
assumed from the sway of a guy
who throws an arm around his someone.
O vat I can’t vet – your emptiness unlimited –
I give you the size and body
of time, the eyes of my son, eyes
that see value in the sheen of someone else's car, the kiss
of my wife, a kiss that warms a shadowed gateway
and spills out into an alley where three trashcans
blossom nosegays of lavender.
© 2009 Hephaestes (Henry Shifrin)
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