The Work of Decision-Making

It Had to Be You

Faults were passed around
our home of nine like heaping
plates provided

mouths never knowing
want. With all of your faults
is how the song my father

engraved on my mother's
engagement ring goes, I love
you still, reminding a marriage

with sultry confirmation
of decisions made by teens
in a time of war,

each one planted, by parents
who remembered what is was like
to go hungry, on American soil.

The Work of Keeping Small Children Off Rooftops

30 Girard

My mother was 28 and afraid
of heights when my father left

leaning on the house the ladder
Bobby and Richy climbed

to view the boats floating
on the Great South Bay.

This was just the beginning
of children leading one

or another to a greater vantage
from the two-story colonial

by the swamp and woods
designated forever wild,

of deciding which one
would be caught if two fell,

of lollipops proffered like bait
luring small children

with wide eyes and sweet tooths
back to terra firma.

The Work of Living Rooms

The living room
is not exactly an ironic place

to be, looking back at me
from strategically hung

mirrors holding
not what lives here,

but what passes
for living. The top

of a head, a corner
admiring itself, jade

receiving dawn next
to aloe, philodendron,

just like my mother's
mantel before me held

trailing vines and my father's
closet door mirrored

lives passing loud
and humble.

On The Work of Men

Miracle of Pipes

They run beneath everything,
laid mainly by men
with families, sweating

joints in trenches dug,
some by hand. Once
in a while there's a burst

and those great grand-
children come and excavate
like plans also laid

that don't quite work out.
Not exactly foundations,
unless you count water

which we mainly are,
afterall, like the veins
of civilization at it's best

pumping something like blood
for the assembled starting,
at the tap,

another day in other trenches
drinking in infrastructure born
of tears and genius.

The Work of Change