Happy Memory Recollection Club

We’re a club of two, sometimes three,
when the waiter decides to eavesdrop behind his tray of appetizers.
Two men with tufts of grey hair protruding from our noses and ears,
sipping stubby glasses of watered-down liquor.
Our booth is in the corner, surrounded by pictures of the Rat Pack
and stencils of old Packard sedans.
This corner of the restaurant is cold and dust falls from the light fixtures.
John and I talk in low voices, hiding our lips behind soiled handkerchiefs.
The years we talk about come in chunks, book-ended
by wars and children and wives and nights in prison.

We talk about our twenties and thirties.
About two decades in black and white.
Before our Second War, John and I would swim in watering holes
after long nights at the packing factory.
We drank from brown bottles and swam
until our arms grew tires and heavy
Our uniforms stained with algae.
The sun never set, crawling to the top of the horizon
and settling itself on hills that looked like a long brown rug stretching forever.
I would pick up John on the weekends,
and we’d drive my Ford
at dangerous speeds on back roads, drinking from those same
brown unmarked bottles.
Those nights lasted until the Ford’s block cracked
on a cold night in January.

We talk about our forties and fifties.
The days we spent in jazz clubs,
engulfed in thick unfiltered smoke and baritone flat notes.
We talked about reading our children bedtime stories ten years earlier,
about the accents we used for the French characters and animals.
We listened to the songs without names from bands without names,
in clubs without names.
Those baritone notes soaking into the tables along with spilled drinks
and melted ice cubes.
We watched our sons die on television eight-thousand miles away.
Their limbs blown into little fragments of ruby and crimson.
Other children losing their minds while winding down rivers
beneath a beating foreign sun.
John stopped believing in God, when he imagined
his son’s soul swallowed by pythons.
He moved to a suburb in East Rutherford.
A split level ranch house with shutters
and a yard the size of a postage stamp.
There was one tree, which never bore fruit.
He named after his son.

We talk about our sixties,
which is exclusively about our penises.
I talk about how mine no longer works.
My prostate swollen to the size of an apricot.
My penis sits in my khakis as if it were a garden hose
frozen in the dead of winter.
John likes to remember the prostitutes he made love to in Korea.
The sex he had in cars that hadn’t ran in fifteen years.
He remembered the color of their skin and which buttock their
birthmarks were on.
We discuss when our penises worked like machines,
and when we knew women, even our wives,
only by their backsides
and their moans.

We talk about dying. About
living in a cloud. Discussing seeing our sons after forty years
with their bodies in tact.
John wants to die in his sleep, face first in a pillow,
with his wife’s arms cradling his waist.
He wants to be free of medication, free of the
syrup from the brown bottles.
I want to buy another Ford sedan and drive
until every last drop of fuel is used.
Cruising across the country on dirt roads.
I want to arrive at the ocean
and walk into its depths forever.
I want to meet the horizon and the sun.