Engine Room

Engine Room David Rivard What if the aging bureaucrat a department-head in mossy gray tweed sports-coat, red & gold rep tie and button-down blue Oxford his receding afro gray-freaked & tightly clipped what if he sits alone on a park bench across the street tapping the fingers of his left hand on the so-called bottom-line the Center for Tobacco Control's 2005 Budget unstable in his lap while the blood-orange oriole machine-embroidered onto his baseball cap watches or appears to watch at any rate a green fly folding & unfolding its languorously iridescent wings right there on the brim that's the way it looks this close to a man's thoughts as soon as they have been provided with a nickname the nickname he'd assumed so eagerly during those years in the engine room but to become another person how could that be possible while the destroyer sailed in humid coastal waters he remembers he gave blood once to save a blond gunner's mate a Kansan who spoke of daddy's girls curfewed girls & muddy hymnals he liked to tell of choirs singing for rain when the devil's hand mirror appeared in the sky two hours later he was dead there on the boat where it mattered most 168 David Rivard that you wake up breathing hard & fast when the order was given "Come here," says a voice in the distance a woman in blue culottes & halter top swiveling near a tot lot "Tm serious," she says to a crying toddler "Come here now." 169 ...