—after Alden Nowlan, “In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus”
I don’t want to be a super hero,
not every day for the rest of my life,
but for one morning, when not a whole lot
was going wrong with the world,
when Lex Luthor and the Joker
and whoever it is that steals
single socks from the drier were all
sleeping in instead of causing mischief,
well, that morning I would like to meet
Spider Man and Bat Man and Super Man
and the customer service woman at iTunes
who got me the whole refund after my son
thought he found a glitch in their system
and ordered $440 worth of gemstones
in Clash of Clans, yeah, her and the Green Lantern
and Emily Dickinson and Temple Grandin and the Hulk,
and all those other heroes, and, we’d be sitting around a table
in a sunny diner somewhere, not talking
for once about how to save the world,
just reading the menu, discussing the reasons we prefer
our eggs poached or scrambled or fried,
you know, something about the way
that the yolk when it’s not cooked too long
will spill its gold all over the toast, and
the waitress would come and pour us more coffee,
and there would be no reasons for anyone
to hop up from the meal and pull on their cape.
Nope, we’d just sit there as morning
yawned into midday chatting about how the rains
came at just the right time this year, and how
the fireflies were out last night, and did you catch
that new movie about the mother
who gets her kids ready for school every morning—
and then we’d just slip into that comfortable silence
that sometimes comes when the stomach
is full and the body is warm and you just
have that feeling that nothing could ever go wrong,
well, at least not for a while, not before
the waitress arrives to say that the bill
is on the house as a way of saying thanks
for all you do, just before the bat phone begins to ring
and the kids begin to fight about whose turn it is to
play with the toy airplane, and the identity thieves
steal Clark Kent’s name and the pirates board
another ship, before from the kitchen
there comes the scent of potatoes
burning on the stove.