At some point we realized what we owed
in back pay we couldn’t pay back; our goose
was cooked, our pancake overturned, kapowww!!
the wet half smooch-side to the linoleum. It had been
a good ride though, hadn’t it, us on our steeds,
galloping in time to the cardinals to meet up again
at the antipodes, each of us richer and ready to spend
a severed arm or a leg on amputee-strength painkillers—
Those were our Chernobyl days, our Exxon Valdez days,
our Hurricane-Andrew-for-days days, all white
and no yolk, all oil and nucleotides and
mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. Yes,
there was a man’s man, looking each of us back
from the lake; and also there, lingering abreast, a stooge,
his Charlie Chaplin suit the mushroomy shade
of disaster relief, his fingers as tightly gripped
around the handle of his tattered attaché as were his teeth
around the affricate he stitched onto the label: Ah-touch-ay
(always a touchy subject). We must have known
he would come back to kill us for insulin money, eventually,
a thing we knew like we knew how to cure cancer:
the diagnosis is the vaccine itself. Reapers come
in pairs now, like Bible salesmen, to toll the bell and wait
for me to invite them into my godless kitchen
where pot after pot of leaden tap water froths
and boils, turning to gold I scald myself to touch.