Elegy with "Satisfaction" Playing in the Background
       

Life is assembled from the splinters and shards
of the broken things we never get around to replacing,

repairing, discarding. It's remarkable,
the flaws we learn to live with. This music

is not of your generation, or mine, and the Stones
never did replace that fuzzed-up guitar intro

with the horn section Keith Richards imagined.
Tempting to suggest art demands such re-visioning,

that meaning rises unbidden from initial impulses.
That the holes we dig in the back yard,

the creosote-coated poles we lower into them,
the woodshed or chicken coop

we never build around them—that these things
matters less than the calloused hand. the aching muscles,

a single hard-earned beer in the evenings.
That finishing the work is the goal but not the end

of anything. If you try sometime
and all that. You are here to help me

because you've finished everything that matters
in your own life. You have been gone years

but I do what I can to call you back.
In your past are cigarettes and war stories,

a youth well spent when being young still meant
having something to look forward to. Back there

somewhere, too, the house you built
for your family: walkout basement,

above-ground pool, large backyard
edged by a meadow of dead grass

from which a single pheasant rises,
rises and disappears into the late-autumn sky.

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Copyright © 2018 Amorak Huey All rights reserved
from Seducing the Asparagus Queen
Cloudbank Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission