Season Shift

The shift change comes and the plant smoke does not

The fumes raise the charcoal gray of Monday morn

Daughter nervous in the fleeting images of home

Wandering as if walls of father are eroding into the muds

Of another hurricane squalling in from the Gulf

A Friday evening Saints’ contest to see the levees gush come the work-week

Cock crows across the triad to see parents and child deluged in mold

The specks still wrestle in the questions

Of what is to happen; the façade, the moorings, the bayou and the railroad

Pathways and shingles pitched at the apex of elementary expectations

To know that normal is an illusion beguiled in the psyche of assumptions

Certain pressures burst the luxuries of ignorance to spill worry about the living room

The pictures flip off the walls so that the screw anchors, patched, painted over

Are still visible to the next family that inhabits the domicile

The wall surface as a whole stood aback and drank with the fire of faith

Converting from beverage to steam into the loft of wishful desserts

Ambrosia with the blues and greens of an aquamarine bedroom in New Orleans

Imaginary until tangible and ethereal until frangible for the next move

To which father attempts to find a face that feels like home other than merely hers

So in she sees her oedipal complex steaming in the buffet tray

To be her father’s female and him in the alcove of where her mother left a vagabond

Hoping he would abscond his child for the distorted image of court and hometown

For out to sea with his four children, three atoms in the breeze and the living-one like a buoy of barter

So that maybe he will do the deed in a dark place where no words can see

The moving, the furniture, the Indians in the summers and the Palestinians in winters

The Jews in the autumns and the Aborigines of spring, the year revolves; he is nothing,

But loneliness, existing in a dissipating memory where prayers are a jester’s tongue

His family sits in a circle of theists turned desists in diluted atheism

He attempts to explain space-time and the round table talks about spirits and light released

Pains of a people clinging for hope in the water’s breeze coming in like shelter in the storm

The whiff of a changing season where the natives are not extinguished

Exterminated in the incoming faith