You, in your football sweatshirt and your hair
cropped so short that after months of having watched it flow into your eyes
our grandfather says that you look like a Buddha-monk,
gazing down at the table with your hands in your pockets,
your wide-mouthed grin holding no more traces of the
brackets gone at last from a jawbone still too large –
smirking down at the Thanksgiving turkey,
though this year at your insistence it is a turducken:
chicken inside a duck inside a turkey,
that our father and grandmother got up at six a.m. to stuff,
the pater (so …

“I never planned to become a pi junkie. I never thought I’d become intimately familiar with the Holy Grail of geeks and math majors, or know that its sixty-forth digit was three. But handsome Derek made me learn it, digit by stubborn digit, as we raced up the stairwell of the psychology department each morning on our way to class.
“Let’s go, Sammy!” he cried, leaping over the railing and onto the stairs. “3.1-4-1-5-9…”
I hurried after him, clinging to the railing as if it were the lone cable …

Some bauble, some fragment-thing—
Some ornamental—missed
The way a fog is missed:
Solemnly fucking solemnly.
Syllables (fever, listen) make up
(make-up?) a photograph
(a photograph of someone,
JFK, alive, looking sad and alive)
It can be your name, can it?
Many words sound like your name
(embedded). We know as fact
They would play chess at Troy—
Unlike Helen, bored Helen—
Minds sharp and out of focus
Like the blind throttling the blind.