Bable Builders
They say blue beads ward off evil eyes,
that garlic dangling from a mirror
stays the skidded tire from the dark slick street.
Swing a lassoed chicken overhead, seven times,
chant a blessing—it’ll soak up your transgressions
like a sponge. Sometimes I can't believe
the folly of my people. To think some smelly, bulbous root
could rouse a god from his heavy stupor.
And the same old dramas, the night flights
and flat bread. The same old king and his granite heart.
Tattered talk around starched white linen. It's the same
old story. Like cows their cud, we regurgitate
what we can't swallow.
My son. Vic,
moves out of the house, all facial hair
and muscle. His brow, thick clouds above twin lakes.
He lugs box after box of what he's gathered to his life.
The sweat dots his head, soon it will weigh down
each fine dark hair. And I can't help myself,
I'm sad.
Sweat, brows, it's the same
old story. When I was young. I had to read
the record in night sweats, the digits
etched into my father’s arm—
bird tracks in fresh snow.
Now, I'm older,
he's a crow's caw. He never stops. Slithers
on his belly from the barracks
to the canteen where he squeezes
through a window, steals two rotten spuds.
His comrades, caught, corralled, abandoned to the snow.
Four striped uniforms in a heap on the ground.
The same old story. And the same old
tents—year after year, the feigned trek across the desert.
But this is the City, not the Sinai! And we're not nomads
anymore. Still, we huddle in our huts celebrating Solomon
who said, havel havalim hakol havel,
which translates loosely into everything is vapor.
Vapor! The breath you barely see
on that first fall day when you babble,
and the air is just cold enough to hold
the damp steam of speech that is all of what we are.