The microwave no longer keeps time.
If I could siphon the faith we have in Intel,
well, everything would be filled
with the purple colors of an evening in the Alps.
A flute player once advised me to vote Nader.
He lost his wife to a ’73 Pinto.
My wife no longer wants white walls; she says
they remind her of too many days spent without umbrellas.
We eat oatmeal because she’s scared
I have my father’s heart.

As for the timers, they fidget: the gym instructor’s stopwatch
and the clock in the break room at work
are yellow jackets in late September.
The weathervane is pegged due west,
and the trails of girls move like caterpillars
over a campus desert.

Clearing out the “American Way with the allurements and buffetings of sin,”
Sister Mary Catherine, my high school theology teacher,
was always picking up gum wrappers and straws.
When Father Ignatius found out she taught
apocryphal writings, “she returned to France
to settle some family affairs.”
She told us about Jesus’ infancy, how he molded
doves from Jordan clay on Sabbath and coaxed them to life,
releasing them without instinct or instruction
into a sky looped with raptors.