The Coin Dish

My dad, David, kept change in his
Michelangelo’s David dish:
The photo in the bottom had a blue
Tint, was blurred, but came through.

The silver kept him decent—I would
Steal it for sodas when I could—
Exposing you, David, gentleman of slug-
Coiled hair and cobble belly, you standing tooth!

I know it’s risky to apostrophize
Even a king’s things, let alone a clay plate
From the Wytheville Rose’s, but realize
Still that cheap discus saves the date—

Dad gave me David before
I left for school, “Because to tell the truth
I never liked it.”  Four
Months later a drunk buddy drug

Down and shattered it.  Which was fine,
It happens.  I carry quarters in my left
Pocket today, clinking like—not quite a sign—
But, god, how ugly things become the perfect gifts.

Tea

               fuckin hippies    -Anon.

The bitten silt, raw silk on the tongue,
uncuffs boring afternoons
and friends without cars or tables,
becomes meditation, it wanders.
I am my drinker’s keeper and get him
a cup, tea isn’t kept on islands.

What about it concentrates us
into a taproot?
Fresh metal hot, cure
for July when cooled, this parliament
of mushrooms prone to being drunk by people
in sunlight. It is like the fan blades
a sago raises, honed and old.

No one’s cup is new, they’re all footnotes
to a bush first men saw fit to drink of,
the water-conjured companion
once Asia’s, now a world tongue, plucked
and sunk to ripen the pulse
of daylight’s homely measures.

(2009-2012)

Watching “Hardball”

A man with a hairpiece like a pat of butter
is laughing in spikes―ha!―ha!―
interrupting women on the other side
of a white plastic peg.
The median commercials show people
who don’t ride the bus
and always wait to learn their options.
Then someone’s steak-faced governor convenes
an argument, and again dairy boy laughs.
A pair of glasses retorts
that his smile is probably freshest, a deep cellar
of white boxes full of smaller boxes,
as another, easily the best man at any wedding,
explains the graphics.  Someone’s falling.
Within an hour we’ve settled vast questions
of human government, that the main things
scurry at the edges or in its groin,
and are best left to experts.