You can be a good girl and not know it.
You can have a memory of a man-
made lake named Thunderbird.
You can be ten, driving in the back
of your uncle’s Triumph, listening
to Santana’s “Evil Ways,” a song
about a lady who’s got to change, the singer
getting tired, feeling like a clown.
This can’t go on on a highway to Luzerne,
the hill to grandma and gramps’ house,
a bulging water tower like a giant troll
where we found the fossil of a fern,
where I fell in love with a boy
who enlisted in the Marines.
In love with a soldier? For a day I was.
I was a good girl who had to say it:
I love? you, my voice rising because
I was shy but couldn’t stop myself.
Years later my grandma shared photos
of Kevin in uniform, a row of metals
crowding his chest. There he was,
and there I’d been with him and gramps,
at the edge of the woods to pick boletes.
Kevin, my one-day boyfriend. Evil ways?
Why did I love that song so much?
It was a big hit. WABC played it
on the hour. That opening drum solo!
Still sounds like the day I first heard it.
Everything yellows, wormholes,
is bulldozed under at a dump. Entropy reigns
everywhere except on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora.
Now we call it streaming. Could there be
a better word? Stepping into the same river
twice. Not quite all in flux. Flowing,
yet static. Like the mystery of the star
in the center of every apple.
The apple isn’t evil. The woman
wasn’t evil, didn’t have to change,
stop hanging out with Jean and Joan. She is
all over town. This can go on.
