It’s Friday night again, two movies so bad
another one of your lives has trickled out
between them, leading your son along a dark
gauntlet of minivans to the cinderblock hut
for a pee and a cherry ring pop. While you lean
against a wall marked MEN, your son steps up
to the plastic trough. This silence, during which
the counterweight of now shifts in your chest –
you stare into the bone-blank movie screen,
projecting there, in reverse, your role so far:
in the first scene you start to regain yourself;
your son dissolves in increments, your wife
grows more expectant; so you untie the knot,
your paths uncross, a man she’ll soon unthink
she loves is seventeen and her first mistakes
unmake themselves. As animated squirrels
arouse, the credits remand you to this place
where, late summer, the natives pay and park
and wait for dusk. Your son returns, zips up:
“I couldn’t go.” It’s colder now. The stiff
walk to your spot in the herd of family cars
is lit by the movie-beam, the fissured space
above your heads. From this angle, you see
a mayfly, flicking wings and bent leg-wires,
already old since shedding its nymphal skin
in a runoff pond eight hours ago – it loops,
scribbling its presumed signatures among
the light, spellbound and solo. And the plot
glides on its track, a dog is named and lost
and found again. There is no consciousness
sky-bluer than this blanket stretched between
the three of you. (O threadbare, O believed.)
“If this is what there is, at least it’s yours,”
we might have said. “Let it be what there is.”
Todd Smith 