John Ashbery's Birthday

Do you remember how it was in the beginning when the rain was an understatement and the maintenance man inside you brought his lunch pail to work every day? Do you remember his name was Charlie and he ate fried chicken three times a week and he had two missing teeth, one upper, one lower, at the front of his mouth. Like a vampire, he couldn't be seen when you looked in the mirror. But if you buried yourself in sleep long enough, if you woke with a start and immediately forgot why, then you likely were only moments away from having shaken his hand. And sometimes you sat down on the floor together, played cards till dawn, with B movies playing on the TV in the background casting a gray-blue light. He always wanted to eat, but whenever you offered him a snack he refused. Said he was on a diet. But you could see his bones almost through his skin. He was young and wrinkled and spoke to cats and dogs most freely. He didn't have a preference. He was like an angel in that sense. An angel without wings digging a hole under the fence to get to the other side. Fried chicken in his eyes, he was as much at home in the east as in the west. And his daughters played outside, skimming over the ground less like rocks over water than like sunset over the slopes and treetops on the horizon. Of course, he's childless, so when his youngest daughter crashes into the bird-feeder, he doesn't run outside. Sunset can't upset the man who does—not at the moment at least. The man who remembers how it was before the rain became hyperbole. Who after washing his daughter in the bath, cleaning her scrapes and bruises, brushes the invisible calloused fingertips away from the top of his spine. Who puts his daughter to sleep and picks up his son, takes him downstairs and starts swaying to a song called "Maps." His ten-month-old bundle of Ashbery in his arms, fallen asleep, barely.