The Bread We Eat in Dreams

her son died and the narwhals

wouldn’t talk to her anymore.

Or.

The revolution came and went.

The records of those metal domes

and rusted bolts

and a boy down there in the cold

got mixed up with a hundred thousand other files

doused in kerosene

pluming up into the stars.

That’s okay.

the boy in the black says.

I don’t think the nineties

are going to be a peach either.

We do what we’re here for

and Atlantis is for other men.

Once there was a boy under the sea.

I dove down after him

when I was six, fifteen, twenty-six, thirty-two.

Down into the dark,

a small white eel in the cold muck

and into the lake of my father’s boat

I dove down and saw:

brown bass hushing by

a decade of golf balls

the tip of a harpoon

rusted over, bleeding algae

and a light like 1985

sinking away from me,

dead sons and lost wives