Beards, moustaches, and thick ropy pigtails
have sprouted like mushrooms after a rain, as if 
everyone were on one long vacation in the back woods. 
Fathers who haven’t sported a goatee since college now 
seem ten years younger, while their wives have stopped 
dyeing, and look fabulous, long gray hair in ponytail
or braids. It’s like we’re all out fishing some clear stream
in Idaho, or watching waves crash off the rocks
of Maine, loose hair flowing, wave on wave
and curl on curl. The hell with styling and trims, 
it’s 1969 again—let’s all pose for our own classic
album covers, shaggy bangs and ‘fros and man buns,
Rasta dreads and every shade of gray lifting 
in the winds of chance. Even the cancer patients 
are getting in on it, removing their scarves to let 
their punk bristles poke skyward and shine, white 
or peppery, blonde or red as their scars now quietly 
healing. Yes, everywhere you look the wind 
is letting hair rise and fall, is ruffling and teasing 
each head like trees in a forest or grass on a hill, 
not one leaf or blade forgotten. 
                        

The whole time we slept
raccoons stretched and batted
like dreamy cats on our roof.
Not five feet from our pillow
they gamboled, scritching the shingles,
brushing our windowscreen
with ardent fur.  Dew-christened
aerialists, they might as well
have sprouted from the dark
like sudden mushrooms, or dropped
on our porch roof by the moon.
 
I had no need to see
by their ironic masks
what they might think of our married
slumber, side by side like chunks
of firewood, while in the bright
spring air and moonwash this pair
frisked for their own cloudy benefit.
 
By the time the dog roused us
with his strangled growl, on point
before our common window,
I knew without a glance
what my flashlight would reveal
hissing and humming near at hand—
what else but love itself
somersaulting its antic way
all over our mended roof?

My dead colleague and friend appears
near the tail end of a parade of folks
from my old life, the usual scraps
 
of talk, flashing smile, frown,
half-shadowed faces of Mary 
and Ted, Gretchen morphing
 
mid-sentence into Cassius, my
boyhood cat—so far, it’s 
standard issue dreamtime,
 
me on the way somewhere
vague but urgent, criminally
late, with door after door locked
 
against me. Then he rises
just as in a horror movie, 
blocking my way, haloed
 
in dry-iced light from a doorway
I need to pass through. He’s
nervous and wary as in
 
those final days when he’d slink
into my office to tell me his dreams 
that were not dreams to him but real: 
 
car stolen in the night, pickpockets
lifting his wallet again, C.I.A.
and F.B.I. coming after him 
 
any day now. “David,” he’d say, 
over and over, “I just want to stay 
out of jail.” Don’t we all? I tried
 
joking at first, then switched
to earnest: Just a misunderstanding,
I’m sure, we’ll work it out together,
 
and finally promising the impossible:
They’ll have to come through me first,
my friend. But of course I knew
 
they would come, and soon, even
if the enemy is us, as Pogo said,
a distinction without a difference
 
to him. And so now he returns
like my own unfinished business,
and demands: “Have you all been
 
talking about me?” I let a long 
moment pass before saying Yes, but 
we’ve only been saying nice things.
 
Then I’m awake, or think I am,
feeling I’ve let him down again,
having told him lies just like
 
the others did, even though 
I’m still not sure just how.