when you can taste the pulse at the back of your mouth
alkaline, imperative, soft – hot
with all your swelling promise of youth
wearing the mask of responsibility –
when your stomach settles like cement-blocked feet
to the bottom of the river,
and even to swallow feels a Herculean act,
when the blood speeds in your veins
(you, the carnate reminder of Route 66)
and your hands claw for something to grasp –
anything to grasp –
as I know they will –
(no Sibyl I, call it observation and calculation) –

stare at the sun until it loses its form –
his poetical globed fruit,
the ball you threw against the gymnasium wall,
the face I saw above your throat for years.