We were scolded like children,
told we’d never fit together 
as if we were nails in a drilled hole,

matching more important than love,
yet a lifetime later my hands smell 
of allium, and yours of rosemary,
mine of dirt, 
hand-sculpted soil,
yours of blossoms, water
                        

Once, when I was eleven, I stayed on a farm
for four weeks in the summer, and each dawn
would watch the farmer Bill Johnston eat breakfast, 
prepare, then stand on the porch without a word
watching a landscape that had neither a twitch
nor a bird in flight nor dust in circle,
as if summoning the courage to work the farm
that he said would kill him. 

Ten years later I watched a pilot 
in the same studied pose on a tarmac
before he boarded a plan to Viet Nam,
somewhere between getting ready to die and dying.

Quarantined, elderly, all of this morning 
my father has stared out the window.
                        

has been ruined
not by right-wing cant
or left-talk rant
but by the coupling
of the wipers’ slide
with the ups and downs
inducted through the power board
into the harmonic of AM.
The odd kiss
of the wipers sounds
like any first hooking up,
a rough collision
then a metered slide,
or if set to intermittent
punctuates the broadcast
as if attempts at intimacy
were blocked 
by a teenage sense
of wariness. It’s the power board’s
escalation and blocking
out the radio’s play
in tuning up and down
that most upsets,
noise negation cancelling
all efforts at listening
to music and speech.
I find those times
I pay attention to the wind
roaring through the open
window, wishing
I could leap into
another life, as if a psychiatrist
shrinking from the drone
of a disconsolate patient.
The powered interference
has taught me the value of silence
in the background of a group.  
I am FM, the quiet one.