I'm Tired
At the end of the first warm day
the sky turns lilac above the station—
like an upturned bowl
collecting maybe milk
maybe blood
that clouds up as they mingle.
The spring night, voiced by
dogs
peevish in the alley
and the growl of amateur motor-sports enthusiasts
screeching westbound on aging 94
toward a vague Ann Arbor
with violent urgency
voiced by the
splashy sound from the Sunday night
wine bar minglers
that wraps around my building
and up into the static of my bedroom.
We wanted warmth and now we are too hot.
We wished for age and now we are too old.
The dogs yap about how you feel ancient
but are even older now at the end of that thought
than at its beginning.
Who cares.
Your mother calls and makes a joke
and you hear a sweetness unique to this world—
one you desperately wish will never expire
like the milk mingling with lilac in the warming sky.
Please, let it remain
somehow and somewhere
other than small talk reminders
on voicemails
you never deleted.
Eternal knives
will be
the reminders of that sweetness
and the recorded voices of
its breathers
once their breathing
has stopped.
Eternal knives
will be the milk
and lilac in a polar sky
frozen into
the world's
fanglike daggers.
You nod off briefly—
standing upright at a urinal in Target.
You calculate your current
social media stats and whether you have
enough coffee left
for the following morning.
Everyone in this town could use a night in.
Everyone in this town begs for the breath
of a hyperventilating other.
The motorcyclists should muzzle their mufflers—
slow to a crawl and capsize gently into the newly
softened ditches of spring grass.
Fall asleep and make drowsy love to the present tense.
I can
hear the Ann Arbor college kids snoring from
here. Their girlfriends, concocting
drastic moves in secrecy dreams.
Fall asleep and make drowsy love to the way
things were
and always will be, in certain secrecy
dreams.
Close the wine bar and mute the techno.
Shutter Target until tomorrow and carry the kiddos
off to bed humming the theme song to "Bonanza"
with a soft galloping motion, like
my dad did for me
once.
Let us nap now—
lest we fall deeply asleep in our 40s and never
fully reawaken.
Let us make drowsy friendship with the sacred
grandparent/grandchild window of
brief temporal overlap.
Let us pet the alley dogs into silence, telling
them stories of our suburban origins
that are now ending.
Where dad cut the lilacs too short and they
never quite grew back. Where we sold the house to demonic strangers
who get drunk on our half-empty containers
of laundry detergent.
It is a nightmare and a heaven simultaneously.
Let us make some sense of it
or at least get enough rest
to grant it enough humor
to function
upon waking.