Pajama Quotient

Coinage of the not-yet-wholly-

             hardened custodians of public

health, as health is roughly measured

             in the rougher parts of Dearborn.

Meaning, how many parents,

             when things get bad, are wearing

what they’ve slept in when they come

             to pick up the kids at school.

The best of talk, said someone

             once, is shop talk: we can go

to it as to a well. But manifolds

             and steering racks are going

the way of the wells—offshore—

             so the-nifty-thing-you-do-

with-the-wrench-when-the-foreman-

             has-sped-the-line-up

has become a ghastly shorthand for

             despair among the people

you are paid to help. Despair,

             sometimes, of helping. In

the winter dawn a decade and a half

             ago, we’d gather around

the school bus stop—the unshaved

             fathers, mothers, dogs,

the siblings in their snowsuits—so

             the children bound for

Johnson Elementary might have

             a proper sending-off.

    

The privileged of the earth, in our

             case: words and stars

and molecules were all our care,

             a makeshift village blessed

with time and purpose. And

             a school bus stop,

to make it seem like life. By far my

             favorites were the Russian

mathematicians: bathrobes hanging

             below their parkas, cigarettes

scattering ash, their little ones for the

             moment quite forgotten, they

would cover the walls of the shelter

             with what

to most of us was Greek but was

             no doubt of urgent consequence

for quantum fields. So filled with joy:

             their permanent markers on the  

brick. And then

             the bus, and then the children off

without us and our little human pretext

             gone. Fragile the minutes.

Fragile the line between wonder

             and woe. The poet when he

wrote about our parents in the garden

             gave them love and rest

and mindfulness. But first

             he gave them honest work.