I could start the story with a boy’s knee
stuck between the bars of a jungle gym,
the three firemen that pulled away from the wildfires
blazing in the Angeles Crest to bend the bars
and set the boy loose. I could start it with a bottle
of Corona glowing through dust and cobwebs
in a teenager’s garage apartment
where grown man after grown man died of a heart attack.
The town so quiet you can hear ambulances rage
in the sub-sea level channels of mansions
and cul-de-sacs and the concrete river
where people are constantly hurt. I could start it
at the post office with the decorated
Vietnam vets and the wrinkled passport photo curtains
and anti-depressed parents curling the corners
of money orders they have to mail by five p.m.,
their children in remote, snow-smothered college towns
in parts of the country they’d otherwise never visit.
I could start it on one of the Liberty Streets
or Magnolia Streets, the roads with all names
taken from Shakespeare in the one-way connections
between North and South. My mother laughing
in a sudden photo taken early one morning
on her walk across the Berkeley campus
in the mist that shrouded all men except for my father.
My mother asleep under the dog’s blanket,
my sister hairless and being born. I am drowning
in sun in a roundabout intersection
where cars circle like cogs, and I could
flag one of these anonymous people down
and say I am in such deep trouble
I’m glad to join you anywhere you happen to go.