To Failure, and: Heat, and: A Poem Not Sanctioned by the Human Subjects, Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee

To Failure

You and I are like a marriage of convenience
between two down-on-their-luck families,
the Eastmans and the Roebucks, or the Nixons
and the Goldwaters. We don't care for each other,

but I have a bottle of wine and you have a corkscrew.
I have a pack of cigarettes and you have a lighter.
We agree to sheathe our teeth, drink the wine,
smoke, kiss. A day becomes a night, one night

becomes two nights. I get out of bed, put on my boxers,
shorts, and a white T-shirt silk-screened with a photo
of construction workers eating lunch atop a skyscraper
in 1932. The sun is hot when I walk around the corner

to withdraw twenty dollars from a bank machine.
The dots of gum on the cement sidewalk look like
an exercise in a child's book. Connecting the dots
to see where they lead seems luckier than going back.

Heat

The car has broken down again. If I were older,
I might be able to help. My father needs the help,
but I'm sweating in the backseat with my brother.

My mother sits up front, eyes straight ahead looking
at the raised hood which fills the windshield.
I've learned on my own that only strangers pass by

when you're broken down along the side of the road
in a ten-year-old car. I'm not angry because my father
has taught me that nobody owes us anything. The windows

are all down. The Pepsi bottles are empty except for one
half-filled with my brother's piss. I'm old enough to know
that now would be a good time to empty the bottle as my father

comes around to my mother's side and rests on his elbows
in the window. I lean out of the back with the bottle of piss
in my hand. Running down face and nose, his sweat makes drops

of shade on the asphalt. There are hours of daylight left.
We'll get out of it. Inside the glove box are screws, washers,
bits of wire, and a lucky button, Kennedy: The Man for the Sixties.

A Poem Not Sanctioned by the Human Subjects, Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee

Someone, tired of the office chair,
or someone tired of walking around
the chair in the hallway, rolled it
out of doors to the fourth floor stairwell.

Two pigeon eggs, almost the size
of supermarket eggs, side by side
on the sticks, white against the blue
of the chair in the shade, made me

bring my incredulous daughter to see
the nest and its eggs. We crept up
the steps like a couple of manx cats
without bells to see the blinking eyes

of the sober pigeon for ourselves.
Other birds cooed back and forth
somewhere we couldn't see.
Iris and I looked at each other,

then we slowly left. She wants me
to bring her back. I've told her
that we can't touch the eggs because
the mother would abandon them.

Is this true? I've watched starlings be
eradicated from city trees with fire hoses,
and I've noticed broken eggs at the feet
of aluminum ladders below the eaves

and gutters of apartment buildings.
It's the lesson of necessity, isn't it?
Some things must die for the sake
of public health and safety. She's just

old enough to understand it now.
Still, it's going to hurt her soul.
It's going to mature her. It's going
to make her become more like us.