Back home, after a few tokes, he’ll sometimes
put up his dogs and thumb through his album
of photos from when he was Youngguy: Superhero.
There’s beefy newborn Youngguy, sitting up
to speed-babble all of a womb-absorbed
Moby Dick to his dozing nursery-ward peers.
Infant Youngguy’s designing Lindbergh’s Spirit
of St. Louis on his Uncle Wiggly high-chair table
after a noon bottle and a flight around the room.
At show-and-tell, he lectures the kindergarten
on Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, translating
from the German. (There were no questions.)
For the junior high prom, he’s flown Artie Shaw
and his big band in from L.A. They watch amazed
as Youngguy outshines Shaw with a tonette solo.
In the season-ending football game, Youngguy
unloads a long-bomb to himself for the final score
as Smallville High defeats Farmville 438 to six.
At the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study,
Youngguy and Einstein share equations during
their dart game at a local pub. (He let Einstein win.)
Youngguy studies for his first adult case: preventing
the Nazis from making Uranium 235. (On their final try,
they wound up with a quart of tapioca pudding.)
Oldguy wonders if he was ever that tall, brainy,
and wrinkle-free. And the flying, was it a dream?
Nodding off, he lets the album slide to the floor.