Image courtesy of The Public Domain Archive
Evening Letter
It's 11pm and I've almost forgotten to write you
and what would you do then? What would you think
in Indiana while your newborn naps on your chest?
Once overweight, now gaunt and bony,
a-million-steps-in-Istanbul-thin,
you're crazier than mangos and work a normal job
and the dew swells on lawns of houses
that don't even know you exist,
though they will soon. We have different fathers,
but we're brothers watching the same pendulum
mete out time. In the chronology of the poet's life
one moves from fashionable beginnings
to rooms with nooks and crannies oblong
then finishes in a raincoat on the rent-free
seafloor. How did we end up there? It's a long story,
and it all makes sense when you tell it backwards.
I love the part when our parents were zygotes
and the gates of paradise were still open
and time and space were contiguous, long before
you bought the solar RV you always wanted,
and I'd had a good cry on mother's neck.
