A Tale Retold

for L.B.

To hear the legend, your boyhood

was nothing but one long science

experiment: how you measured perfume

in the pillowcases, chipped away at fossils, boiled

rocket fuel in Mom's best saucepan

how you were Spock, not just that one Halloween

but for eternity, a superior logic board

encumbered in flesh, a knot of awkward

limbs, more goggled-eyed over Lasser's curves

than any centerfold's

hard to remember that identity's a yarn

like any other, historians are spin-doctors

casting their spells from the warp

of omission, the woof of repetition

as we learn our lines by heart

so this too bears recounting: how you

were Zorro, Superman, Red Eye, you chased

Leslie next door and pinned her breathless

to the laughing ground, and when the rockets fired

you blasted after them like a star sprinter

click through the slide-show, take care

to recognize them, these handsome strangers

from memory's dim mirror, hear them whisper

their forgotten truths: how no life reduces

to a single story, no matter how prize-winning the plot

call them home, embrace them all:

the daredevil biker hurtling through

the sun-mottled glade, the gentle lover

cradling in Mother's arms, the boy whose face

peeks through your own son's smile