Tuesday at Work

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I.

Maples heavy with rain to come,
papery with contracts given over to concrete,
that sense you can feel missing parts of each day
in cresting waves of light, the huge vibrato
leaving behind what eyes perceive,
what couldn't simply merge with light.

Maybe you just notice it more after you're fifty,
the same light drinking up heart beats
looped to heart beats with those Zen holes,
as puritans up-end severe prayers, pejoratizing ills,
Tuesday a red wavering unknown awakened

to ripping of fresh cards shuffled in a family,
the well-mansioned ones reaching,
the whitewashed flesh and clothes no matter
the ultraviolet, the neon word NO appearing
and vanishing in a new van window,
Hondas racing in compounds, photochemical
contusions of air visceral and helixed
in dreams of future rebirth.

II.

Tuesday is not Friday or Mercury, but a vibrato
the size of continental drift, scraping off febrile
television broadcasts, the afternoon bowling
its sphere on backs of searching snails swimming
over garden rock when the chemistry's tight.

Wee hours day or night camphor medical waters
in the lift of gravitationally high brows
and Cartesian grid of stoplights sending away
supplicants in steel, white coats dripping
bread powders at the pound bakery,

long gypsy hair brushed between stalled managers
at their last-minute nuclear desks just in case,
fast handling glass doors on glass-ceilinged trains
built on hovering tracks that soar over the horizon
out west in a future electrics, to the end
of vibration-that's how long work can be.

III.

Roaming infrared up there in platitudes,
in the plenty too, the virginal disco
really rolls thirty-five years ago now.
Nuthatches zip across a yard and vanish
into birds in the trees. The tire warehouseman
still leaves the white building by a loading dock,
his false teeth lost, the vibrato continuing,
the quick young on the hill, asking for work
in a hurricane, tumbling cards if the big quake hits.

Pelicans in formation speed
five feet over the nearby ocean,
and then mid-air, hovering,
they strike surgically
bill-first in a sun-blaze
when their jobs are clear.