The neighbors along the fence-lines guess what kind. And kids in ballcaps, ballgloves slipped on handlebars, begin all kinds of reasoning, letting their small hurts sink and catalogue for decades. We read our Heidegger, Rilke, Heine, our clock-smart Kant, imagining a nonsense trimmed, targeted by news assuming earthtones and devices, leaving sons with memories, with all the sharpness yet to feel they've encountered. We let the miracles show through, the sticky light of Friday's wine show through catastrophe, leaving a family innocent, suffering the dreadful foam, the words received in sealed correspondence, the famished looks of a sister afterward. Listen to the children cry for men who fall behind them with promotions.
Decades look like that.
We might expect these hardest figures then, lives widows paint, far things come back, shimmerings settled on white buildings or travelling in parts, travelling in names for cowardice, lives widows paint, withdrawing among themselves or winking into practice. A man will wince before the trays of produce and dressed hens, will leave the cards untouched, conditioned by talk and weaponry, by the eyes of divorcees peeping from their draperies, anxious to have him come, spending his afternoons as these for all their housekeeping allow him. I get my rations plus and drive, doors opened when I arrive, because the room's too warm, because she's stepped to the blue fields of a poor man's street, telling his jokes about the midriff and surprising busts, about the fabrics then, whatever the stitching meant, the lettings out and cuttings back, the patterns meant to show or to conceal. And she, at home, cuts back, enjoys a physician's courtesies, a room cooled down, as if for sleeping in, whatever she feared from it let out, whatever she learned in love between the scotch and burgundy, becoming this light between, the gauze screen drawn through light, between 2 caught up in the weight of their own bodies, because the evenings spooled so much, because the splendid tongues and genders complicate. I follow ideas out, the early drivers out, looking ahead, into the sound and its importance, into the weeks to come, and the walks to be alone at exercise.