For D, reading poems
When I was a kid, only a flu could buy me
a screen cubed and populated. In morning,
the mugging Bradys, appraising one another
above and below, glancing summary judgments
through the lattice bordering their blue cells,
like a yearbook page come to dubious life.
In afternoon, an ennead of actors and comics
in Rubixed cubicles, a tic-tac-toe board:
nine rooms, mostly desk. And this is what
we thought of when the world got sick,
we who, now middle-aged, watched Jan slide
her siblings the side eye and Whoopi
wise-crack from a grid’s center square. It is
what we made jokes about, seeing ourselves
populate cubed screens. That spring
we subscribed to Zoom and pretended
that we, too, were one thing: a family, a troupe.
In illness, you do what you must. You build
the dollhouse or dormitory a diorama at a time.
Tonight I am listening to my friend read poems.
Here it is the hour before dark. There, too—
a high window turns cobalt behind him—
but not everywhere. On the first floor, a man
in an apron makes a late supper, his back
to an obsidian pane, and on the third is
a yellow room, a woman capped in sunlight.
When I was a kid, I wished the Bradys
would lean past the sashes of their squares
and chat across the matrix of that rookery;
I wished the Hollywood types would visit,
would exit their kit-cat portraits and cross
the shotgun tenement, the game show’s set.
And for us, too, I want this trespass: egress.
I want the courtyard our quarters overlook.
I want the illicit bonfire lit in the cube of air
that belongs to all of us, or none.
