Hating his skinny wife upstairs in bed,

Who when he was most alive was almost dead,

The man god-damned his neighbor's car instead,

Bumper to his this morning, parked last night

To be beneath the unsleeping tall street-light,

In fear of a switch-blade at his tires, a fright

A news-flash gave him, all of a dandy dad

And an ever-loving mom's delinquent lad,

Vivid because the newsman's son went bad,

A boy whose mother drank to find or forget

Her runaway father she'd be living with yet,

But after him, married the first man she met,

Which made him the wrong one. Just behind,

She'd never know, a man at the edge of her mind

Had stopped for a story's end, by nature kind.

The story's teller, a much-avoided bore,

Lived, when the skinny wife was a child, next door,

But moved, and there's no connection any more.

I made it all up, like the gods whose latest laws

Added to but never cancelled out what was.

Even this I honor as statutory, because

Sometimes they crossed a hand under the other hand

And looped a dangler onto an untied end,

The neighbor the newsman's father-in-law's friend.

I remember the night my girl gave back my ring.

I walked, turned left, right, left, darkening

Streets of the net she'd thrown for my strangling,

And fetched up near where I'd begun, of course.

It was thirty years ago, and could be no worse,

I thought, ignorant of the unbottomed source

Of effect from cause from effect. From things that go

Bump in the night the Good Lord deliver you,

And me, and us from the boring story-teller, too.