“Ride life straight to perfect laughter”
–Charles Bukowski
in another room
not this one
lisa’s birth cries
flow like arias
into the night
one midwife reads
a medical text
at the kitchen table
I should be worried
but I’m not
presently donna arrives
late but expected
with a bottle of wine
and a half-empty calendar
of Li Po poems
we laugh and hug
as she pours a glass
it slips like time
through her fingers
shards of glass and wine
flow red across the floor
and I wake as much
as any of us ever can
twenty years late
into a different house
with a delicacy like glass
I pick up bits of dream
and try to write it all
before I slip further away
into the day’s current
present tense
and can no longer
separate what happens now
from what happens then
or one dream into another
(June 7, 2015)
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