They were never the Waldrop’s,
they were nubile machinists that
refused to take holidays, apartment
littered with pinecones and socket
wrenches, corkscrews and special
hooks for hunting halibut in certain
climates, the climates you were
never really in, except in postcards,
the ones with your mother’s shoes
and your face, tight against her
muslin frock, or was it polyester,
I forget, I always forget, forever
in the act of unknowing the “Once
Knowable,” so armor my anger—
oil up the robot of me with flexible
joints and prize pigs turning on
wooden spits, ahhhhhh, to rust-up
in a summer rainstorm, to atrophy
to the vibrations of a babies boom
cry, a baby that is not your own
but that of the man on the train,
the one with no smile and scuffed
suede shoes, forgetting all others
the ones that stopped looking
and they were never at Brown,
never in Providence, or double
billed at Double Happiness, no
they were not the Waldrop’s
and that was not their baby,
gurgling up milk and staring
at the Hudson River.