The man by my side, patting my collar down, brushing cat-fur from my sleeves before my appointment with the magician—he knows, my husband, the importance of these nights and yet still wonders what it is I seek at the magician’s house. He knows there’s more to it than a rabbit and a hat or a shell game and sometimes his eyes snap shut like a doll’s. Tonight his hands will linger on the abrasions—Yes, I’ll say, he’s still working on the sawing trick, almost got it down and I don’t know when this fantasy grew to such proportions—the magician, the magician’s assistant, but this man by my side, he sends me on my way and as I open the door he says, You forgot something, hands me my battered paperback on illusion and escape.

Somewhere there’s a key, lost
in the rubble of a cobwebbed garage

or wedged in the corner of a moss-covered shed.
Who will find it, hold it in her hand,

rub away the rust and muck?
What you hope for—not treasure in a padlocked box

but another unlocking:
rush of strawberry air, hint of hay

that years ago kept you awake;
climbing down the fire ladder, over the gate,

meeting your best friend in moonlit pasture
to ride your father’s horses bareback—remember

how you’d turn toward home when you heard the horn
of the morning’s first ferry crossing the bay?

That flame burning for them
can’t mask the stench

we shared. These days
of creak and recline my eyes

roll back to blood-
storms and soiled

fatigues. Edges
of calm breeding

practical jokes,
irreverence necessary

as K rations.
Boiling an egg

over The Flame,
I hear them whistling—

men I haven’t touched
in fifty years. Cracking

smiles wide as the Arc,
belly-laughing, dog tags

jingling like a bell
choir. “Why not, doesn’t

the fire belong to us?”
says Mac. Joey wants me to try

a sausage on a stick
or a can of SPAM and I think

about a discharge paper,
a finger, a hand.

Some days were clank-and-drag—
chains at the ankles of Scrooge’s ghost

—only add more thudding and sweat.

Other days the failures inhabited my gut

        —marsupial
                pouched—

attached to the lining and grew.

Finally the disembodied lips
of a man I once loved

couldn’t take it anymore (sharing space

with unused gym cards, Xerox’d diets,
procrastinated plans for self-esteem)

crawled up and over into light—

became a kind of undulating pied piper

        shriveled
                pink

leading a conga line
of miscalculations and defeat.

So long suckers I crackled at the motley parade

not fathoming the hollow space
renegade malignance leaves.