february 18, 1989

(survival of the sentient)

All in love and war cold as crap 
even without the Missile Gap
even with love's armament
next to the folded map 
in the glove compartment

of your mom's 1985 Buick LeSabre.

Not to too belabour the point, 
but why was your nose so out of joint,
when I started to sing along with that song,
as we passed the protest signs of the Falun Gong?

This wasn't a fishing expedition.
If we'd had access to DOD tech 
we'd have trilaterated the position
before converting it into verse
with Harry Connick Jr., or worse,
crooning Fly Me to the Moon on the cassette deck.

Heck, there was a bounty on Rushdie’s head and every TV 
in town was tuned to Gretsky's 
shorthanded to and fro
head faked breakaway wrist flick past the Nordique goalie's left ear,
his 42nd of the season for the tenth year 
in a row
and the 1,800th point of the Great One's career.

Clear and Present Danger was selling
better than Satanic Verses 
and Calvin and Hobbes split the difference
but you were reading
Bishop Butler on self-deception and ignorance.

And as you parked the car
the rhymes drifted far, far, so far.
For love then, my love, was off limits
as was any talk of appetite
and the first GPS satellite,
launched on Valentine's Day
(and long since retired)
reached an orbit period of 713.2 minutes

11,000 nautical miles
above the Earth’s difficult surfaces –
an ellipsoid, remember, with irregularities
distorted by forces and their variations and our bodies,

yours in value village plaids,
mine in a new pair of slacks
and a white poplin shirt

with a wide dicky flap bib

buttoned twice above the left clavicle

like something a figure skater
would wear, or our waiter,
who regaled us with a flight of whites
and an electric parmesan grater
that flashed coloured lights.

Nothing tracked us home.
I ran flat out from where you parked,
heart pumping, mad with excitation,
stained with sauce.

And you? You. You then, you now.

No need for balls of crystal,
things and actions are what they are, said the late lord bishop of Bristol,
and their consequences what they will be
no matter how many likes we get or pucks we cough up.

So why should we desire to deceive ourselves? 
Why seek harmonies where cadences abound?

Reaching back, reconciling, recollecting
perceptions proved by perceptions, 
particles shed like beliefs,
what we were transformed into, what we became, what we are,

substances twinned in sameness, 
seeing the world sometimes the way we wish it to be 
rather than the way it actually is, my love, 
merely probable, a series of patterns 
observable in you and me and on the moons of Saturn, 
in all nature, in all weather,
in all human affairs, together.
And sometimes not.