Stockbridge

Last year’s alarm clock by my beside silently, vigilantly ticked away until 4:02 AM In the hour of Platonic picture-perfect darkness kept company solely by the bloodshot red Of the alarm clock reading 4:02 AM And a suspicious newcomer, causing panic like a foreigner in a shtetl, arrived In my abdomen, pain, as from machete clutched by any modern horror-flick fiend Or ancient Mayan warrior bronzed by the timeless sun, who had seen it all by then Pain induced, and the panic of ignorant xenophobia at this alien agony, nameless Causeless, baseless And I, car-less, helpless to the whims of any pluricellular stowaway aboard the meals I ate Or long-waiting malcontent festering quietly at my expense, awaiting my moment of weakness, Before crashing the drums of revolution, Or even maverick cell born of my own body, swearing me the true enemy And the alarms are sounded too late, or rather too early, before any outside force can be called So I collapse into the indifferent suede of the sofa, With mutable chestnut Rorschach blots on the cushion shadowing our past encounters, And I conduct the grand electronic symphony that permits the tinny notes of Arlo Guthrie’s guitar, which shoot like bullets, speed like beams of light Across the years from 1967 to today, from Stockbridge to my apartment To me, son of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, and of a thousand other fathers My world defined by pasts, by traditions, by the presents of others. The pain subsides like the tide, backing away foot by foot as it glares me in the eye Grudging me victory, in the battle, anyway, though the war may be yet begun, So I nestle in my quasi-significant nook in time, as in the hug of an oversized sofa, Between the aftershock of near-death and the afterglow of “Alice’s Restaurant” And I hope my present may too hurdle across impossible chasms Like Wells’ Argonauts, my presently unknown gifts, May suffice as to be a past for the present of another To voyage to the future to comfort their solace, though my hand may be eternal still, Like the acoustic guitar that had its day in 1967