Tomorrow Fries an Egg

and plates it to demonstrate
how rapidly a memory congeals.

Tomorrow’s memory is alimentary.
Tomorrow’s breakfast is something else.

Tomorrow, full of hail and laughter,
drives its clipper down the interstate to Ferndale.

Tomorrow strums a song in poplar leaves;
it flushes mallards from the burdock.

Tomorrow makes a vocative of sand
and stomps the hardened pellets from our shoes.

Tomorrow buys the green bananas.
Tomorrow is adept at waiting.

Tomorrow is the edge wave of a seiche
breaking cattail stalks like matchsticks.

Tomorrow arrows over a barrier island
like a tern—its eyes scan the water.

Tomorrow is a basket on a bicycle
carrying buttermilk and green bananas.

Tomorrow asks the pickerel to unhook its maw;
it has no stomach for what’s foretold in putrefaction.

Tomorrow kites astride the turkey buzzard;
its guts are sour. It’s halfway to 82.

An Inheritance

Not all of the benefactors have perfect teeth,
though their smiling pictures would have us think so.
I thought I’d learned the value of a dollar,
but now I realize the degree to which it fluctuates.
Easy money at low interest is the stuff of odes.
It’s impossible to pay back what we owe
when the dead come calling with posterity in mind.
On the way home from a weekend trip to the Thumb
in a whiteout on the interstate, I wind up
inches from the bumper of a Silverado
whose rear window decals read,
“Clean hands, dirty money.” I puzzle over the phrase
the rest of the drive home. All accounting
practices seem strange to me, and all aphorisms
struggle to account for what accounting can’t encapsulate—
the strategic devaluation of a poem, the net
operating loss taken while reinvesting
the trochaic capital gleaned from music in a stanza.
The primal scenes we remember are being
endlessly reconstructed from the nebulous
indexes of what we’ve lost. All my interactions
with my father have been oneiric in nature.
This is especially true after his death.
I hammer the plastic panes from a picture frame
and keep the little oval portraits.
Every time I see him I gasp with the realization
that he is dead and doesn’t seem to know.
Sadness doesn’t actually do anything.
To deduct sadness is to itemize what can’t
be held onto in a fiscal year. It’s the only asset
that accrues interest and dissipates simultaneously;
its distributions are called “taxable events,”
but they rarely get reported in any meaningful way.
The accounts of the dead requiring, as they must,
a bloodless language for the living to go on.

CAL FREEMAN

Cal Freeman is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear, 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press, 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals, including The Oxford American, River Styx, Southword, Passages North, and Hippocampus.

WINTER 2022