Oil and Karras

There, on Allston Street in Cambridge, 
spotlit by streetlights, 
I consider cobblestones 
peeking through a broken patch 
of Twentieth Century pavement, 
the dead feet that trampled them, 
the horse shit that mucked their spaces, 
their lines of undigested grass, 
erected in stone, ripely exhumed.

Then I recall my mother’s pruney hands
submerged in soapy dishwater, 
gloveless, her cracked red skin
scrubbing mugs for boiling black tea, 
Saltines and Philadelphia Cream Cheese 
displayed on ancient platters, waiting. 

Her texts were hieroglyphs before Rosetta
but her quarters seem calm, welcoming: 
The scented candle is lit.

New England secrets summer winter: 
her window frames, bulwarked 
by tarps and blankets, muffle
the raspy arctic moans which
beg to exhale within.

Her blue eyes don’t pierce now but glow
a wise twinkle like her dad’s
as the radiator clanks
an SOS I can’t answer. 

I watch her tugboat roll into the green stew
from the relative safety of the seaworthy
lifeboat I’ve secured for myself.

No sunnovabitch: I’m a bitch of a son. 

Back in Cambridge, 
I spit onto cobblestones 
before they’re paved over 
again & lost for centuries. 

Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.