Kilroy Was Here

I told him I loved him
We were nearer the windows
than the door,
his blonde hair bushy
face fuller than in high school
He looked like a lion

Years later his shrink
told him not to worry over
famine, earthquakes, injustice
His doctor told him to get a stent
His ashes in his sister’s garden
told him wind
will sweep us away

We look like ashes you’d see in snow
from a train
going into the city
you walked around
it was a sunny day
you went to a few bars
you sat on a park bench
pigeons landed and flew



Leverage

Two red bricks sunk in mud under a faucet
to which a black hose is hooked
come to an angle.
To get them up I’d need a spade.

They remind me of a boulder in the side
of a dugout in the desert.
With a crowbar Jim and I
and our (now deceased) friend Henry
wedged it free. It took time, discussion,
leverage, which Henry knew about.  
Round, mostly bald, bilingual,
fluent in Spanish.

His brain surgeon daughter’s husband
sold Amway. There’s an imbalance,
Diane raking in the money, Fidel scraping by.
I spent lots of time in motor vehicles
with Henry.
One day, spotting a biker, he said Diane
did lots of surgeries on motorcycle
accident victims.  
She stopped operating because of arthritis
in her hands.

Henry’s wife, driving, hit a motorcyclist
whose wife drove the law suit they filed.
I knew her.  They settled out of court.
Always, to me she seemed very nice.  

Henry and I spent good number of days
and nights in the desert helping Jim
with the dugout.
Someone else might have used a backhoe,
but Jim wanted to do it all by hand.
In addition to the crowbar we had rakes,
shovels, a wheelbarrow,
bags of cement. Rocks and boulders.
I remember that one boulder, but not what
happened after it was unearthed.