Devil’s Lake

All the fireworkers on the third floor

couldn’t put back together again your head, your ethereal car.

That was the essence of water, mulling you over and over and drifting off thoughtlessly,

then a century passes and a second ship

makes a puppet show of the horizon for a very long time.

Begging your pardon, the alcoholic simply didn’t drink enough before he got on

and where did you think you were going

watching the skirts of the water ballet like a dog in a painting

the curtains never end, hanging at the edges of your vision

like leotards the gods have outgrown—meaningless

except that it was better, you thought, to have a wife and kids

and storm off to scar all the islands in some sort of circle

sleeping with a witch and then a saint and then a witch in the shape of a god.

You’d bronze up your body so hard

even the hydras, climbing up out of the Lethe and trying to block out the day,

would wince when they hit you.

Maybe you were never really lit at night.

Anyway you just couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t you.

All the Episcopal swimmers, fluting their bodies and fluting their hands—

new moon and crescent and gibbous and full, gibbous and crescent and new

nobody cares where your head may have been in the city, desisting,

everything about him is outsized, as somebody said,

even his transcendent little body is transcended by the size and the glow of his hands,

he breaks walls with everything, with everything hopeless—he turns it around

in the eye of a horse on the quilt, which covers the door, and parts now and then,

revealing a child, growing up into a car.

The tectonic shifts that created the system, the little white backlit stars,

don’t mean the mayor will sit down to dinner with us once we’re done

trimming the hulls of the hedges—the Molotov Cocktails are lit, the cocktails are sipped

in the front room of the passive old position of the world, which fits into a tophat, a rabbit

into the back of a truck, into the air on the farmland, into the town, hedged against

the city with the demon-red lights of the airport, which guide your father home.

So the wishbone is broken, but no one knows which of you won. Someone had mistaken

the brandy for a weak little thing, and slowly she finished the bottle

and spun through the rooms, eating the turkey and eating the pie

and the thistle said things, picking the food from his teeth, about a theory of life

or golden boughs and priest kings, the big Caledonian ones,

but now as it stands, you’re brushing your hand on the heads of the wrought-iron fences

and every third lot or so is vacant, and here you wish that you did not live.

Beverly’s a damn good name, and Kevin and Tom,

so the curtains parted with applause, and your daughter starts your car and sits and smokes,

and the horse ran off, having just been born.