Bread, Meat, Greens, and Soap

It feels like déja vu all over again.

Yogi Berra

I feel like I'm about to be fired,

or my doctor will say I have

the obstruction he suspected,

or my 2nd-story-divorce-efficiency apartment

will be rubbed out by a clear blue sky

when I get back.

For instance, right now I'm walking around

this brand new cost-saver supermarket

conscious of this weird impingement

of loss, the way amputees feel the ache of

a phantom limb, only I'm talking about all of me,

when I stop and ask an illegal alien stockboy

what street is this, and he croons to me

Larmanda, Larmanda, which means Larmanda,

some nameless City Father's long lost wife,

and I realize, Holy Mackerel, right where I'm standing,

between the fresh fish and the meatcase

is my old bedroom where me and Willa,

which means Willa, made love every day

after laps and breaststrokes in the pool

of our lovely, torn-down walk-up.

And not fifty feet away, years ago,

behind the pharmacy, I slipped a disc

but kept crawling forward, thinking

who on earth has knifed me in the back?

Right here in the hyped-up screaming

of the cereal aisle, the kids used to fly around

the kitchen like cartoon characters.

I wanted to grab the old lady

blocking my bedroom with her cart

and argue about this, let her know

how it was with us, but then I figured

what's the use, what are you going to do

about a past that is now

hundreds of thousands of tons of processed food,

a seven-billion-pound carrot to keep me going?

See how crazy with excitement I can get,

as if my life were living proof

of the Unified Field Theory,

which, in fact, to anyone who's hungry

is business as usual, a big so what?

Like taking pride in a miserable grocery list.

I mean, if you can feel it

about to rain in your bones,

and goddamn monkeys and geese

can sense a disaster

a priori,

if someone with some cash

can raze the past

and plunk a Safeway down on top of it,

then what else needs to happen before

the future will have me convinced?

I consult my list, the instructions I wrote

that amount to a soap opera on how to keep going,

written with such a magnificent sense of ease,

such amputated detachment, that right here in the store

I'm firing myself, divorcing the past from the present,

saying, Get your things,

just get what you came to get

and get out.