There is a Mom Thorndale, Judith.
Judy. J, when I’m amorous, Jude when I’m feeling coltish.
 
We cruise the main street of our horrible suburban town
with windows down.
 
We catch the scent of roadside barbecue and diesel fumes.
We catch the eye of many other suburban families
who wonder who we are, and where we’re headed.
I cock my head and leave my mouth open,
my remaining teeth glittering in the sunshine
so others will know of my deep, immense, pleasure.
 
I drive a red car. That must be apparent.
 
Pop goes the weasel. Pop goes the mighty freaking weasel.
 
My wife and I drive and hold hands
in the manner of younger people.
She’s a firecracker. She’ll be all through this book.
 
She is upstairs. She has no idea that I’m writing it all down.
That I’m writing down these memories of days gone by.
She thinks I’m downloading the porn.
I wouldn’t want to disappoint her.
I should tell her the truth.
She’d look at me with less disdain, I suppose.
With more charity.
 
Love and cherish. Sicker and poorer.
 
I’m the flip side of the vows.
 
I’m the one in the wedding photos with a tie askew,
with a glassy eye,
but smiling, grinning to the camera,
and holding on to my Judith, her new ring,
and the rise and turn of our life together.
 

I take my father’s name
and lay it on him.
I’ve carried it long enough.
 
When he is old enough to know,
I will tell him about the old man,
the five good things he did in his life.
 
That the name means nothing,
doesn’t belong to any inventors
or CEOs, is not important.
 
I write it in my own scrawl,
the letters jumbled in the middle,
misshapen, felled by the weight of the pen.
 
Because I am nothing like my old man
and then exactly like him. Same belly.
Same darkness. He wore it like a badge.
 
But my son, this name, gets a new chance.
And I wonder if by passing it along I am able to escape from it,
or if instead I merely increase its size.
 
Something big enough to crush us all.

It has always weighed on me,
the pure blue of its satellite photo,
the bulging belly at the equator.
 
As a young man I relished the challenge,
the openness of the horizon,
the delicious falling away of the sky.
 
Now, nearly 50 years along a modest path,
I am cramped and hemmed into
the simple square streets of Somethingville.
 
The forward movement of my youth
has halted, and now I make tiny circles
with my feet in soft soled shoes, waiting.
 
I wobble to the basement when it is quiet,
hunker down in early morning hours,
making and unmaking my confessions.
 
Alt+save.
 
Sometimes, when the sun breaks through
these narrow slits of windows, I make grand plans,
chart heroic courses up the stairs, and back to the world.
 
On the screen I display a photo of me at 25,
the grin of a young man. I flex my fat face, emulating.
I grin into the reflection of a pudding spoon, searching.
 
And I know in this instant that I am too scared to finish any of it.
I am suddenly awed at the pace of its passing.
Off balance and falling under the hateful gravity.

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