A stranger shot a Polaroid of you and Laura
side by side in the boat on your way back from Jalapa.
 
I have no defense.
I didn't know someone was aiming a camera at us.
Laura took one look.
She always photographed so you could hear
a skillful slide-guitar in the background.

But you, you were variable. Moody.

"It's a good picture,"Laura allowed, in her vaguely nasal whine.
"But you don't really look like that."

As if ecstasy in the crystal glitter
under an angel-riddled waterfall,
was an everyday thing.

Her radar picking up the twinge he's feeling good,
she shape-shifted instantaneously into a grotesque
semblance of my father, purveying
specious and gratuitous "hard truths"and "facts"
under the auspices of "reality."

—Perhaps if my experience of life had been other than it was
I might have been more sympathetic

to the ones who see you differently than you see yourself?
And say no to your unreal wishes.
For the world to be. Other than it is.

Didn't you...chime in...too?

Yeah: when I caught you after Sunday school
with that mascara-crazed vamp with the wild black hair
out of a low-budget vampire flick
 
like Black Sunday
 
in the dust of that faded purple curtain fronting the temple's stage
reserved for special events,
like plays the little children performed on Purim.
 
It wasn't she who bothered you; it was that a Jew should come from the lower-middle class.
 
—Or when I got the thrilling news that you'd been absent
the second semester of your sophomore year at Highland High,
driving my two-toned Dodge without so much as a license
whenever possible...; so yes,
I guess you could say at that time I too said no to your—
or so they sounded then—fantastical propositions.
 
But I also remember the happy accidents,
like the time you went to the track in Denver
when you were visiting your Rideway buddy:
you bet on a horse named Saint
Exupery for no reason at all (god forbid
you should have consulted his record!)
except that it was the only name you recognized
and the odds were something like 50-1 against him
and he won—
           
            placed—

won
 
Either way you came out ahead on the day.
 
Chance was the real victor.
 
It depends what you mean by chance.