When he was flush, we ate dinner
at Tung Sing on Central Avenue
where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic
bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-
and-sour pork— what else
was there to care about, except his sleep
under the pup tent of the news? And the car,
which was a Cadillac until he saw how they
had become the fortresses of pimps—
our hair may look stylish now,
but in the photograph it always turns against us:
give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976
he went to see the enemy, the man
(with sideburns) who sold German cars
and said: take it easy, step at a time,
see how the diesel motor sounds
completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink
around the block in the old neighborhood
where he imagined people (mostly black: by now
his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,
then cut) lifting their heads to look (-kuh).
And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung
back into the lot to make the deal, although
to mitigate the shift in his allegiances
(or was this forgiveness?— for the Germans
had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)
he kept the color constant. Champagne,
the color of a metal in a dream, no metal
you could name, although they tried
with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now
though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump
of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.