Trash

Happy birthday, Al Roker is how every August 20th call opens

between me & Devin for a decade, shifting only once we are old

enough for mortgages, knee pain, the same blue joke about being

here at all: black men past 25 with a harrowing percentage of brothers

we chased in childhood now in chains, graves, instead of here with us,

on the phone, or else in some gentrified bar growing old over bourbon.

I can no longer recall how the ritual was built. Something to do with

my relationship to meteorology, perhaps, as it holds many things I adore

within its frame, and feels much more like the prophecy of old than anything

you see on TV these days, unless you watch the sort of shows that Grandma

did, before she went the way of everything too beautiful for permanence.

Al Roker is a weatherman. He conveys in human speech what we cannot

pull from the sky’s great gray drama. The tropical storm is over his shoulder

now, spinning, harmless only at this level of abstraction. I change into the rain

-coat that matches my favorite hat. In poems, I grow immortal. Time

gathers in my hair like a silver city seen at a distance.