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
