In the Plumbing Supply

Ronnie the yard man wore 
a look I’d never seen. 
I’m quite OK, I offered, 

but he seemed unconvinced
and too aggravated to entertain
my version of events. 

They told me you got killed,
he groused, skulking off to find 

a water heater and lengths of pipe
while I leaned on a counter

worrying over materials and time
and staring out at Grand River.

Not dwelling on the subjunctive 
in those long-gone days
of lugging pipe wrenches house

to house, I pretended unlit
paths weren’t forking away 
like feral cats. Then friends died

and I got old, mostly unaware
of my luck, of the all-night trucker 
who didn’t skid, the genetic trait 

that failed to emerge, the cops 
who weren’t looking for someone 
who looked like me. Ronnie’s source 

put the wrong name on bad news,
but it was bad news all the same.

Parenthesis

Laundry pinned to ropes
that stretch toward a garage
at the end of a green yard,

sheets and towels straightened, 
shirts popping, the lines pulled 
into long arcs by a west wind.

At least once, I must have stood 
on the cracked basement steps
taking this in, not as beauty,

which it was, nor as love,
which it surely was, this work
of my mother’s hands at night

after the work of her days,
but as a shape more elemental,
one of the marks forming what

I’d later think of as childhood,
a parens half-containing mysteries 
enacting themselves upstairs

in the kitchen of our house
and outside in a riven town
already bent on coming unglued.

No. It was never unbroken. 
But before the drama
(though there was no before)

a breath larger than breath,
a wave suggesting motion—a long
curving line reached back in time.

MICHAEL LAUCHLAN

Michael Lauchlan has contributed to many publications, including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Bellingham Review, and Southern Poetry Review. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave. from WSU Press (2015).