The yoke of a soft boiled shell is amniotic as the
ear infections of 1969
in the living room
where I saw the first Apollo landing
play back in 1976

at my mother’s funeral praying
for Stanley Kubrik, someone sniffling over Kleenex,
he faked all moon landings
and the footage, Stanley Kubrik complaining, the whole bloody
mess, one small step, one giant fake. No
multiple universes entered here.

There’s no room,
in the inn, or in the others on the strip,
not really. All the imagined pain is imagined, and
here to stay
as the bacon and eggs wiggling in the pan
in her hand
from the remembered song
on the radio
in the kitchen,
Mellow Yellow,

always on, playing
it’s way out and it’s way in, the way my first son came to,
for instance, wrestling in the crib of a stomach,
the world begging for him, all crab.
And he, all King Kong,
his hand clutching the
the tip of a heart, like a Big Mac.
Standing on eskers of
panhandled organs, the peninsula of liver under
kidney stars, just under the water; no, just above,
darkness summoning a sun like a worm
rounding a jar with
calls of

Gull bladders for birds
on the wind finding their ways outside the window.

I hear a chime,
I hear a can
bouncing on the sidewalk.
No, now
just her
breathing next to me, one, two, three,
and four… My heart
contracting like

Our Grandpa Hoy who died in his sleep, still,
one assumes, drunk on war and beer
and women from Iceland

and hearing aids
nearly big as his too-big glasses, and
reminiscing about that great love
with a drink in his hand, splits a make-believe egg
over our heads and Kathy and me, we
feel such tactile invisibility
pour down
our young skulls

As, my young wife,
the Caesarean crater in her body,
and the blood-shot, white-outs of her eyes, the windows of a vessel
(where does the soul, as it sinks, find a pocket of air?)
where there’s no choice but to
carry what hijacked its way in, then whip her
on its way out. The wave which eventually becomes
the whole body.

That blossom
of four hundred thousand roots
That you love
As if you always have.

To come so close to loving the chimes kicking the can.
And the breathing, again, as though it were chasing you
around the block all night,
and the shadow’s shadows inside the shell.