THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

  I’ve lost a few things along the way. I’ve lost the sound of my dad laughing at Crazy Guggenheim from the sag of his summer chair, which come summer wore a tropical skirt. A floor fan droned like a monk’s prayer, a freight train rumbled past with the weight of the nighttime surf, and Adolph, the neighborhood love-struck shepherd, howled at the moon while fireflies danced like Bolsheviks in Petrograd. I’ve lost the scent of my mom rehearsing her mournful daydreams as she misted herself with atomizers that ruled like royalty on the court of her bedroom tray in the heart of Queens, while the shiny knights of lipstick guarded the round table. I’ve lost the grumbling of my sister, her hormones raging through her like Kamikazes, leaving her adrift in a harbor of teenage wreckage. I’ve lost the throttled silence of my grandmother, her sanity long gone from the yard, taken by the crack of a tragedy bat that sent her to the bleachers with the invisible mothers who had lost their children ...

  I need to feel the underfoot sand, ocean’s silent partner, waiting for the wind like a setter at the door  which  will send me back to the Hollis train station  at the arpeggio of dusk, clinging to my mother’s summer-shy, Coppertoned legs, breath held, ready for my father to suddenly appear with a weary fedora smile a briefcase full of dandelion dreams and comic books— collected like oysters from the distant shore of a newsstand— my first instruction manuals on how to fly. And tonight,  all these memories later I need to watch the mint julep spin of a Bill Evans record, its notes landing like the light splash of hand-slapped cologne hours before I trace the lower landscape of her back and say, with more tenderness than my heart can bear, how lucky we are to share the moon.