It starts with a slap and a gasp
and ends with one last flicker
the snap of a gap
from neuron to neuron
but in between……..
there are bronzed shoes
and training wheels come off
and doves perched on powerlines
over bedsheets hanging
on clotheslines drying in the sun.
The way the crabgrass felt under my feet
before the world and biology kicked in
the universe had my sticky fingerprints all over it
and I inhaled it through my skin
and desert sun in April could feel
like old velvet movie theater seats
at a Saturday afternoon double matinee.
The day i got my drivers license
August fifth, nineteen sixty eight
was my father's birthday,
twenty three years to the day,
when the crew of the Enola Gay
dropped a bomb named Little Boy
on Hiroshima.
That night, on the roof beneath a moonless sky
the milky way was echoed by the foam
on Duxbury Reef, the wave's hiss
blending with John Coltrane's tenor sax
moaning through the open window.
I howled at the sky.
I ate the raw blue flesh of a rock fish.
I raised my arms towards the spangle,
poked my fingers in the eyes of the stars
and felt myself expand into that dome of black,
out into the grass and cypresses
and pebbles rolling in the surf below.
and it had nothing to do with a drivers license
or my father's birthday or Hiroshima.
maybe Coltrane had something to do with it.
