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Sheltering With Friends
(February, 2021)
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1
Sheltering with friends
from the winter
from this new state of capture
this novel quarantine
inside a garage​​
in Ford's Dearborn
​​​
a car exhales
its workday's remnant fumes​
​​
it roosts inches from us
and from the modest little table
that gathers us around it​
​​​
its grimy plastic surface
strewn with traces of cashews,
hollow shells devoid of pistachios,
shriveled serpentine clementine peel,
insignificant flakes of ash
wafting about,
enduring cigarette burns scorched
deep into the rigid plastic surface,
like crashed aircraft skids,
and echoes of our
last pronouncements
​​​
our aging knees and spines
subdued by a punishing day yet again​
our weakened teeth and eyes
incapable of sin​
our shoulders loaded with bundles
of sighs and concessions
​​
anything we declare
is but a temporary triumph
a venture in words
​
​​​2​
​
Outside,
a dark evening overtakes
the February landscape
​
an exacting razor-like wind
offers cold, sobering atonements
for anyone with the courage to atone
few are the takers
​​
outside,
the heart of a crushing storm
hurls its icy munitions
at the walls of our shelter
before stumbling begrudgingly on
to other misfortunes ​
outside,
a mass pandemic
an anointed shutdown
a societal convulsion
​
the ferocious jumbling
of worlds and forces​​
3
​
Inside,
the secretive adventurist elations
of three wistful men
giddy wondering
what may emerge anew
​​
my tall friend is smoking,
waiting for nothing anymore
his hand moves slowly towards
his charming ravaged ashtray
​
my other friend is also smoking,
rather petulantly
his disquieted gaze focused forward
as if to follow a frightful muted
theatrical projection
that only he can see
​
we talk about how much
we can still remember
and how much we can still conjure
​
I watch them both stammer
between moments of my own
wildly blithe decrees​
4
Outside,
tender shoes press obscurely
into layered snow
​
he says his son,
coming home from work
from university
from the perilous minglings
with the people
from the daily searchings
of early manhood
​​​
we listen to the frantic night
eerie and elegant sounds
like lavishly illustrated storybook pages
howling snowy white brushstrokes
savagely mingled with swerving
blacks and blues
​
and small bits of borrowed gold​
globules of guidance
dangling in the night
​
the night sky
overlaid with murmurings
voices written in sprinkles of warmth
across the infinite indigo dark​​
​
like the outstretched fingers
of the helpless​
reaching across the soft, cottony
fibers of time
​
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