Outboard

A drinking buddy gave our dad an outboard motor.
Dad kept it, up to its orange chin in bilge,
in an oil drum, up in the yard, and, after a few,
he’d go out and start it up, yelling, Get back,
you kids!—but we were already back, and ready to bolt
if the green plastic men we’d thrown in up and busted the thing.
But no tiny, acid-stripped skeletons churned to the surface;
the army remained at rest with the worms and the pear cores.
All that spring, when he felt good, he’d go watch his motor,
his nostrils straining to catch each oily fume,
a Chesterfield dropping ash down the front of his work shirt.
Once Shaky Louie, his pal, braved the terrible sunlight
to join him in motor watching, and, chatty by nature,
told us Dad had said soon that our freezer’d be so full of trout
there wouldn’t be room left for even one skinny Popsicle.
By August we’d scrawled SS DAD on the slimy oil drum,
but he never noticed, just stood in the din, smoking, staring.
He never did lug that motor out of the oil drum—
he let winter do in the only toy he had, though it spat
muddy rainbows and roared like a locomotive,
and gave off the piercing and molten stink of hope.