The cook invited us into the alley.
It was just dawn. But the dawn
Of the cafe’s anniversary
And the champagne began.
Never mind we’d never eaten there at all,
Nor that the famous Al’s Breakfast
Is minuscule—a wall,
One row of stools,
Another row of waiting customers,
A wall. It’s beloved.
Three glasses each,
We watched the cork fly
Like a hummingbird across the roof… . At ten
C. started the Bug from underneath,
Its dandelion yellow transformed
To a seed-burst
Where he cracked the windshield with his fist .
(Not long ago, he admits,
In terms of human evolution).
The seats radiate stuffing
Like beaten, sun-cooked dolls.
The license plate suggests no American word
And stammers us
To a place where we learn
To spell our names in hieroglyphs—
A symbol for a sound; an ankh, a bird—
In front of a mummy.
He looks sweaty
Like a roast, but holier. So this
Is a throat that sang,
That called in cows,
That a woman
Kissed deep into on a riverbank. . . .
The vista we drive out to
Looks as far away
As the mummy had looked back in time:
The bluff we climb
Isn’t frightening to look down from;
It sees a harp of routes—
Rails, river, runway, road—
Spreading and shining from downtown.
Before a baby Mississippi,
Double engines pull house-size
Boxcars like a marigold tugging
At bricks. Shoulderbladed planes
Waft over barges’ cargoes
From this distance
Stable and glideable;
We make like we could push them with a finger.
It’s Third Grade social studies;
The next unit
Will be communications,
A fan of wires shining like a grackle’s tailfeathers
And bothered only in unison
By the wind.
That blue air blows through
The woof of worn bluejeans.
If there can be such a thing as tight
Open places,
Here they are, like guitar
Strings. The warp has been the first
To go, to use a phrase
The widows of my family like. . . . River,
When I have navigated,
I’ve steered by a chart’s half-words:
SFT and YL that water shrank
From SoFT, YeLlow, RocK; :
GRaSs, Mud, BlUe.
The bottom approaches and flees,
The fathometer can sight-read.
But I suppose those little Lears
That land smooth
As anaesthesia and take off like champagne
Have no abbreviations to describe
The heights, don’t say
The air smells GRaSsy here,
Or, in this flyway are how many
Of the hundred different birds
In the Pharaohs’ alphabet?
C. had to start the car
With a flashlight, the way the sun
Jars this valley alive at dawn
So that traffic inspires the air
To follow in and out—
Harmonica dynamics. C. pinched a tiny
Hohner from his pen pocket.
Even it
Was small because of the distance—
Replica of that one Schirra
Took to the moon,
Which was new
Yesterday.
Leave a Reply