Spotlight on the Navajo throw. Other 

nighttimes. The bed against the other wall:

“The cold, having snared the blanket from my 

shoulder, is getting colder; coerces

me with stranger’s hands. My bedside rubbers 

fold.” Slave to labor, treasures he can't lift;

a father’s public persona cries his 

need for a private life: “Older now than

Dad was when he was my age, I can still

see clear across the leafless park and track 

a single snowflake through the streetlight light 

without getting out of bed.” The sunstruck  

brick wall – buff, blush pink; framed by sash and stool

and blind – is a window in its own right.

The baby is good news hollered sleeping

lightly as my wife and I gape shaken

in our briefs and nightgown, feeling something 

like two run-down strollers, decorated 

with those stony daubs of desiccated 

apple sauce, like scabs, whose dozy seeping

cargo blithely eschewed bibs. Bothered shifts

the teething kraken; floorboards wakened back

trills elicited from the monitor’s 

louvered slit gills. White noise applauds the cat

retching somewhere in the darkness over

the radiator’s fills. Now the kraken

begins to scat; curtails; begins; or’s that

just the electric fan practicing scales?

As cloven love signs separate Christmas cards,  

precious potsherds spider every meal and

beggar apprehension like a poster

for a concert that’s already occurred.

Cloven love, tendered like a cup of tea, 

remains a hand’s length from small outstretched hands

while intent stains the methodology 

of real neglect very dark green. What gulf

might be allotted in between, yet cleave

a disarticulated locket? Fruits

that settle far apart, if near the roots,

can make me want to tear out my own leaves,

pore through sheddings for evidence of growth. 

Then again, it’s my chore to rake the yard.