Spilt Milk

I dig the ruins in Rome,
those granite columns, domes
and arches of megalomania –
the Pantheon, Basilica and Coliseum.

I am fond of failing love affairs
toppling like dominoes,
one after the other,
where loss becomes gain
and memories tangle
like hair brushed from combs.

I enjoy rained-out baseball games –
swamping a pitcher’s mound,
rolling tarpaulins,
and the ricochet of lightning
striking the upper deck,
like a tape-measured homerun
in a jagged floss of light,
but with Zildjian sound.

I relish cakes that don’t rise –
burnt black dinners, the look
in my wife’s smoked-filled eyes,
Oh, shit! slipping from her lips.

I cherish old men’s faces
worn like dried-river beds,
their leathery hands,
their hearts profoundly stirred
and the legends they weave
never the same way twice.

But most of all, I love the Second Law
of Thermodynamics,
the degree of disorder in the world,
and that everything, sooner or later

will fall apart, cease and disappear

into energy and collapse into entropy.

“Spilt Milk” was originally published with a different title in Right Brain Review, 1991.