Standard Changes
After “Nature Boy”
For lousy pay, I drove a van
between Detroit and Wapakoneta, Ohio,
spinning it once in a white-out storm
and sliding up the Luna Pier exit
to stamp and thaw among lost souls
in the moon’s damp firehouse. Later,
I shot weddings, shingled roofs, herded
children and was called, in each job,
by a different name. Adrift. While
he wrote about love, eden abhez
and his family camped out below
the Hollywood sign in forties L.A.
Today, they’d be jailed. Picture his wife
braving the wind on dry nights.
Maybe she was the visionary.
What do I know? I’m tone deaf,
sipping coffee and reading wikis
amid the tremors of another time.
Only that he moved west and changed
his name and slipped a hit to Nat Cole.
That they had to track him down
to sign the record contract. That we want
to unravel love, to get it or save it,
though everything leads to return,
love evaporating and falling like rain,
like snow, while we turn wheels
into swerves and utter strange
bird cries, waiting for a crunch.