Nearly falling, raising my foot
chest high
to the steel step,

I pulled myself into power.

Leather seat
black, ripped–

and space pressed around my head

like a huge shell
held to the ear.

He threw branches into the bed with thundering bangs.

“Let’s go!”

and we blustered down the rutted road, the wheels
spinning monsters,

huge limbs hammering behind me, laughter
to my left

–no seat belts on this wild flight–

my parents, their white car,
getting farther away.

Dozens of little brick homes, alert to our activity,

curved around us
on the flat land
as we tore past
the corn rows,

that one remaining field,

and disappeared–pure power–
into the woods.

Tenacious
with a troubled will,

she has perfected escape.

She joins the mice and roaches surrounding the living room.

She grabs a hole from her Acme kit,
slaps it onto the wall,
and jumps in

because we complain: the smell of mold,
dirt everywhere, ground into roots of the old shag.

In the bathroom,
a raccoon family peers from cracks in tile above the tub.

–

Our mother loves–she feeds the crafty rat in her mind
as Follain's man

fed a rat, to keep it from eating his books.
Twisted knots in the past
go unnamed

tho I wonder what happens in the silence at night
and if the sound of the Boulevard creek

softens what comes to her.
Surely pain is here–

from secret rooms, from blows that have gone unfaced–
so that life is a burial.

The air's bad for breathing? Says who?

She leaves town fast when words catch up to her.
She takes straight lips into the hole and never explains.

When she returns, we hear stories
of lives in the dark, each one

the same as her own, well lighted by her mind,
utterly normal.

I don't believe it–
my birthday plain before me. Chunks of sky

hug balloons
tied against the dining room window. Candles,

cake and kids–incredible
how much the brain abandons

in deference
to adulthood,

the genes of survival. I rewind again and again, wanting
to remember

blowing out three candles,
but the lungs of those days no longer flourish in the brain.

Later, in the fatigue and darkness of night,
the pillow a soft watch

around my head. . .no, I can't even pretend
to bring it back.

–

A boy knocks over a glass, and the chaos is wonderful.
I think about the molecules

of liquid, the number of times they've flown elsewhere
over decades, the crazy

infinite forms
they've helped to build. Explain to me that number.

I'd like to know a little of its history.