The Spark

•

He sits back in the chair as he reads
Kim's essay and calls it that swear word reformist.
Worlds collide as the Marxist guy
I uphold calls the woman I love
a reformist.

The clock ticks.
BAM.
BOOM.
SILENCE.

I could run out the door,
I could move like Ken to Minneapolis,
I could ditch the personal life,
I could shelve the politics,

but there must be a reason why Kim and I
have worked with each other
these years. There must be something
in this universe working itself out
through the chemistry of our minds and bodies.

My deepest instincts got me this far,
past the blur of schools, the black hole of
rock and roll, the haze over the White House,
the feeling something is rotten
in the state of Denmark,
my identification with the workers movement
after the debacle of the Vietnam war,
the long and winding road to where we are
this evening.

My deepest instincts are all I have
if I am to ever get
to where the children play with rabbits
in the sumac.

At the party she circulated amid
the usual transitional figures,
talking Johnny Rotten and the decade that failed,
but later that night after everyone left
in the porch behind the summer house
our bodies seemed to fit.

We have lived together ever since,
her Marge Piercy and my Karl Marx
hopelessly mixed together
in the bookshelf on East 6th Street
towards some unfathomable future synthesis.

Oh,
she is my apple blossom,
she is my bell that tolls,
she is my mocking bird
that howls it like it is,
she is my bridge over troubled water.

If our love grows and grows,
unlike some other flashes in the pan
I have become enamored with,
I will be the happiest man on earth.

If she goes away
I will survive,
though it will be
a catastrophe.

Last night as the subway train lurched
to yet another halt
and the man on the garbled loudspeaker
announced we would be moving shortly,

a single spark could have ignited
the pent-up rage against the mayor,
the governor, the bankers
who take taxis.
A single spark.

The frazzled nerves.
The deadend jobs.
The gutted services.
The loops of rage.

The Blacks and Latinos exchanging glances
with all the casualness
of the very foundations of the earth shifting
or the first flutterings of a new coalition.

Then, just as suddenly as the train lurched
to a halt, the lights and power switched off,
it was so still you could hear a pin drop,
the silence and the darkness and the strange cameraderie,

the lights and power snapped back on again,
the motorman thrust the throttle forward,
and we began to move,
almost as if it were nothing,

we began to move,
through the ancient tunnel
towards the distant lights of Borough Hall
and of Carroll Street and of Fourth Avenue.

"Funny how quickly things can change,"
I thought later on,
sitting on my bed
in the dark.

The workers gazed down
from the world of their poster.
Outside the window the moon shone
through the branch of the gingko tree.

A single spark.
I sat and ate a stick of celery
and wondered what
everything meant.

Tonight, bounding
up the stairs in her purple sweatsuit
from the martial arts class,
Kim kissed me and she tasted like vitamins.