Fifteen

Fifteen

I want to tell you about the mouse in the bottle,

and how memory can punch a tunnel through time

to bring you back to the consciousness

of a fifteen-year-old boy,

on a cold, quiet night, when the stars

are pinpricks in the black velvet,

and he is walking back from the parade.

He will be wearing a marching band uniform

of black and gold and brass buttons,

and white buck shoes he has polished,

and there is a shako on his head

and maybe it has a plume in it.

Maybe his buddy is walking with him and

in his hand is a cold trumpet.

Not so cold as when he has to play it

at the football game when

he keeps the mouthpiece in his pocket

so it won’t freeze to his lips

when he goes out to play worship tunes

for the football heroes he is not.

But on how walking back with his buddy

under the cold stars,

he sees a coke bottle by the road

and picks it up,

and in it is a dead mouse,

and he thinks about how the mouse died

looking at the stars through

the prisms of the coke bottle

that was his prison,

and that he saw the beauty of those cold stars

magnified and glorified as he died

beside a dirt road in a small town,

and how that memory punches a tunnel

through fifty years of time

to be focused as through a crystal ball,

through a lens so pure and so clear

that I am frozen back there in that moment

with the mouse and the trumpet and the cold stars.

John Michael Hurt / 2016