were part of a problem that made death fair.
Part promise, part gamble, the problem went like this:
How old must I be before I am old enough for my father to die?
The answer was always twenty-one–
a number impossible to imagine.
It made the world fair enough for sleep.
My father didn’t die when I was twenty-one.
I didn’t blame him. He didn’t know that night after night
I had bargained his life away for sleep.
Now to calm my fear of my father’s death,
I remember the delicate plastic landing gear
of those airplanes, their sharp axles protruding
from the hard gray tires. You had to be careful
with the noxious glue. You had to put one drop
of it on a difficult place and then blow lightly
until the tire began to spin.
1
Skimming
It was nothing more than a summer job,
hopping the low fence to my neighbor’s house,
where I paid out the long hollow pole
through my hands, and dipped the skimmer’s
blue jaw into the pool to strain
the insect wings, bird feathers
and carob leaves that lay like the night’s
siftings on a huge blue mirror.
Evenings from our patio next door,
I heard my neighbors thrashing
in the shallow end, their voices
wild in the cool element, their feet
padding heavily over the concrete deck.
And later, in darkness, they slipped back
into the green water silently.
The yellow glow of the citronella candle
flickering far away through the oleanders.
Its oily lemon fragrance heavy in the air. Sometimes I heard the woman crying, sometimes the man, and once I heard a gasp
as dry and sharp and loud as someone
taking a last breath before he drowns.
Some mornings I’d find the pool light
burning faintly in the deep end,
the surface covered with all that was attracted
to the submerged glow, and once I found
a bat floating in the shallow pocket
of the stairs. Its wings spread out
like a Gothic W. Its feet angling
from its belly like a ship’s screws.
And lifting the black mass gently from the water,
turning the skimmer over in the grass,
I tapped the bat out and let it lie face up
in the morning sun. Its features
like a rubber mask’s, reddish, roughened,
as if its passage out of the attic or cave
had been difficult and the twilight air
of the neighborhood provided nothing more
than blue shadow on blue shadow.
V-8
The motor hung in my neighbor’s back yard
for years, tarp-covered and lashed with rope.
Suspended from the rusty block and tackle
of an engine hoist, it cast a constant shadow
on the concrete pad. And all around it lay
the necklaces and hoses of its accessories:
the black spark-plug harness, the bedpan
of the air filter, the fuel pump and distributor,
the carburetor on its side with its barrels
and chambers exposed. And though my neighbor
never rebuilt the engine, he must have thought
about it often: a heavy pendulum that
no wind moved, a plumb bob fixed dead center
like some bulky reference point he ducked
and dodged each time he passed through the yard.
And each time, too, he had to pass the small side
door to the garage which held the silent tools:
the bright chrome sockets and ratchets, wrenches
and drivers bundled in soft canvas, like good silver
shoed in its polish cloth. I was too young to know
what a life’s work was, too impatient to understand
how our true affections are deflected, shunted
by the domestic, by the hard promises we make
to another. What did I know of our capacity to transform
bitterness into love, as he did helping
a teenager load the V-8 into the back of a pickup,
cranking the hoist winch down slowly with one hand
and with the other fending off the willful spin of the block,
until it settled in the bed, tilted on its side,
leaking a puddle of oil, dark and latent?
Iodine
The cure-all bottle fits the palm
of
