Anyway Anyhow Anywhere

Long before the steel crashed over him,

enclosing him in a tomb of musky smoke

and grimy ash, my uncle attended

a legendary concert performed by the Who. 

Six years before I emerged in a storm of 

floodlights and blood, Ari watched as Pete

Townshend wind-milled his arms in

his trademark flail, eyes glazed over, while

Roger Daltrey whipped his cables around the

air through the lull in between verses.The shrieks
of John Entwistle’s pyrotechnics on the colorful,
fuzzy bass guitar didn't leave my uncle’s gushing lips
for weeks as he walked to class

along the autumn-tinged lawns of Cooper
Union where he'd roil in the underbelly
of applied physics. Books tucked in

the crook of his arms sagged as he'd recount
to thin-lipped friends the heights of the night.             
                                                 In his own

way he rose phoenix-like above the pottery shard

arrangements of a harried, shuffled youth

into a narrow frame where he could settle down

in relative comfort.                       Tears shed

over the news of Lennon’s murder led to slammed

doors opening the gates to raised eyebrows and

mouths curling with concern, though never to any

search above and beyond.  It wouldn’t have helped him,

he was a pilot, an anarchist of the

most skilled sort, a juggler adept at balancing the

squiggles of Homer with the psalm-like

jeremiads of Zimmy, all the while keeping

an eye on the progressing discoveries of Rob Laughlin.

and then
all of a sudden
he was gone

in a plane

somewhere over a mountain

       and me

       how I feel inside

       can’t explain