Sitting on the porch-- I look at the puddles
of transmission fluid on the ground
Aware that God protects babies and drunks
To avoid me, you're in the kitchen on hands
and knees scrubbing
Each of us with unsteady hands of solitude
I want someone to explain to me what art is
What a poem is, to my satisfaction--
Ignoring the Prime Directive--
Thou shalt not write poetry
The morning begs for me to notice, to study
The dents in the curvature of doubt
It's the 4th of July
My daughter's birthday
Thousands of people headed for Roswell, New Mexico
The rover Sojourner Truth-- without a winter coat,
unexcited, ready to explore the angry red planet,
Doing what I had daydreamed as a boy
I can't wait for the first colored photos
My heartbeat dreaming of a galactic migration
Poetry, a changing lover that rearranges
furniture in a little apartment-- an unfamiliar
rhythm, words without meaning
On the 4th of July,
twenty-seven years ago a storm killed
four people at Edgewater Park
I've stopped watching fireworks displays
For no apparent reason I think of my old
neighbor, when we landed on the moon,
he said, "I don't believe it, how can they
survive, there's no air to breathe"
I drive past Jacob's field
The Rock & Roll Museum, past the
port authority loaded with rusting steel coils
Tour the USS Fahrion that is docked
(soon to be sold to the Egyptian government)
On her bridge peer across lake Erie
I think, how fragile this world
How we leisurely avoid unraveling
the mysteries of self
Unwilling to stray into
uncharted waters