Digital

Ambling by the lakeside, my spawn tell me
Pop we're going down to the water, their wives
are tall and supple in unseemly sungear
I vaguely remember made a scandalous ripple.

I can't recall my fifteen between curtains,
my phiz a beaded lemon of joie de vie
in piss-yellow light, nor can I remember when
I crested the hump of middle-age, went white

and ruffled at the collar, can't see the Shabbat
when I palmed the elder off like a set of keys
and made the other one twice as useful until
He too surrendered to his bubbled Heaven.

You can't look anywhere but they push at your eye,
the northern and the southern, stem and stern,
those comely wrenches in the math-gears, bugs
to ones-and-zeroes. I swallow epiphanies

like pills; but this one's ancient: on and off
is all and always was, the yin and yang
of ball and socket. Anything else is chin-music. I walk
with fantails prancing in the pride of my eye.