Pastime

1

Unorthodox sleep in the active hour:

young afternoon, the room, half-darkened, is day,

the raw draft brushing sock and soul.

Like cells of a charging battery, I charge up sleep—

if such sleep lasts, I touch eternity.

This, its pulse-stop, must have been before.

What is true is not real: I here, this bed here, this hour here,

mid-day inscrutable behind these blinds.

When truth says goodmorning, it means goodbye.

Voices drop from forms of distant apartments,

voices of schoolboys … they are always ours,

early prep-school; just as this hour is always

optional recess—this has been before:

the sting of touching past time by dropping off.

2

Labor to pull the raw breath through my closed nostrils

brings back breathing another, rawer air,

drawn freely enough from ice-crust football,

sunlight gilding the golden polo coats

of boys with country seats on the Dutch Hudson.

But why does that light stay? First Form football,

first time being sent on errands by a schoolmate—

Bobby Delano, cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

escorted drunk off the Presidential yacht,

winner of the football and hockey letters at fifteen;

at fifteen, expelled. He dug my ass with a compass,

and forced me to say my mother was a whore.

My freshman year, he shot himself in Rio,

odius, unknowable, inspired as Ajax.