Lake Erie Pier

History paints this chance
encounter, where seagull
careens into the earth's ectoplasm,
divines tide and turbulence.

Conversational crumbs our waiter
sweeps into a white towel,
return imbedded in Greek salad
and tender perch.
We toast the wine's genealogy.

Upon the infrastructure
of your question, I reconstruct
the pain of being sixteen, being
the ideal idiot savant
roaming Roger Street.

In the lore of nineteen hundred
and fifty-seven, I loved
my father's white Strato Chief,
dank fruit cellars, spin-the-bottle,
spin-your-45's — spin away —
and reading from twilight
into early morning. I digested
a thousand realities.

We were children crawling from
the war's annihilation; crawling
into the 60's unsustainable party.

Well met today, we are a man
and a woman at a pier-side table.
Sun tickles your retina before
touching down on an escalation
of accelerating motorcycles.

The bill is placed between us,
I pick it up — father on a cross —
mother attending a dream —
stare into the opposing direction
of accepted life and track
a seagull in a broiling sky.