Hey, Nineteen

My hands poured acid down the blue walls

of the pool, while the rich wife inside tended to

who knows what-her elegant miseries, her African

violets-

and the man of the house shattered clay discs

crossing the sun. "Hey, nineteen!" my partner Ed

called up from a hissing cloud, '"'Where's

yer mind?" I stopped pouring and his face

stuck up out of the mist, furious and sour

at thirty-five, half a life gone

to seasonal work and a wife who pushed

him away, even on good nights. That day

lasted all summer, and I stayed inside

myself, a boarder in my parent's house,

scrambling eggs in the kitchen while mother

ripped through her mysteries in the den.

There was a lost love involved, naturally,

and an old grammar school friend who

turned up one night with a zig-zag scar

down his cheek, and a baggie of good dope.

We climbed the reservoir fence at midnight,

sat by a doubled moon at the lake's shore

and talked like Chinese poets till dawn.

We agreed that rebirth gets tiresome, even

within one life, and that the brain

is sad and lonesome up in its tower,

connected to the mainland by cables only.

Vietnam was one senior year away, or Canada,

or Sweden; a savage tender marriage

five years away, and the idiot's discovery

that literature would not save me

ten years or more. But at nineteen you can work

without sleep, you can dream without sleep,

and I rode the pick-up to the next dry pool

in Greenwich strangely happy, Flaubert

tucked in my back pocket for reading on breaks

while Ed sat and smoked, staring at the rich man's

slate roof, the wavering aura of noon heat.