W's

It wasn’t someone puffing a monster doobie, it
was Zito’s van’s exhaust in the lilac evening air, but
this was 1971 and thus that metaphoric capability
came easily, the joint was passed, the congregants
on Noni’s porch were . . . ‘‘stoners’’ I guess is the word,
although Emilio was a journalism major too and an aspirant
toward a night in Amy’s army surplus pants, and
Noni was also a single mother of two and a stripper
out at Tyme 4 Fun, and Zito studied philosophy when
he wasn’t under that van with a wrench and a hundred
curses yelled forth like ball lightning, he
was also the son of a woman who ran for Congress
with a pro-war plank her party nailed mightily into her platform,
which conflicted his pacifist soul, for 1971 was not
the year of marijuana only, but also the year the war
was levering friends and family apart, and also
the year that Zito’s mother had the lump checked out
in a room where the wattage turned her into a frozen doe
in headlights (this happened once
to her son, and explained the canted fender that always
gave his van the look of having suffered a stroke) and she
walked into the night with her medical news
around her like a necklace with a living bird
between her breasts for a pendant, and it kept trying
to fly, to lift her off the earth and toward the little
crib death spaces in between the stars, so empty
and so sad, because the earth was also a vector of time
and space that traveled implacably through
the universe, and took us with it so fast
we were a cloud (said Amy, exhaling a particularly
emphatic one herself) and Emilio started to explain
the staunch five W’s of journalism, but who
and what and when and where and why, he said, were
dead in the twentieth century, and then he shrugged,
so tenderly, with a gesture that took in all of us.

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