The Right Answer

For me, the veranda on mission-style rancheros
Is the company at dinner, on sabbath night (and this only works in a decent-sized house, apartments excluded).
And little learn'ed are we of rituals
Or constellations drawn by ancient words,
Supposedly leading me, like Great Spirit
To Valhalla version 5.

Entrenched in verbal trades;
The exchanging of loving words and affirmations,
Munitions in the form of praise and home cooking.
Not ensconced in the rush of cold water from shower heads that suit tie briefcase days employ.

An unshaken slumber, a dream where your hands are dipped in warm soup, so that you might feel the need to pee,
But you hold it because you want to hear the punchline to dad's joke, which he repeats for the hundredth time,
preparing a practiced chuckle

Because it's not the joke that drew my smirk.
It's mom's handsome hands which wove the bread I now butter;
It's sister's jeering and juggling of complaints about coworkers I'll never meet, nor want to;
It's wife's retelling of a new dress she made from scratch;
It's dad's few remaining grey hairs dancing on his head while he orates;
It's the sauna-like vapor that encumbers us at the table, keeping food and drink hot, keeping guests hungry, keeping night dark.

I look about in faith, thanking something for having more than a nuclear household; for finding reasons to give the week a tail from which to discern, biologically, where it ought to end.

As it really is a creature, a beast rightly, that immutable firewall of chores, competition, hygiene, and right answers.

I can be wrong here with my parentibus
Because at home, mistakes are your upbringing. But in the wilderness, where you are "tempted by the devil", mistakes are your downfall,
And in that revelation I gain another, which I one parts fear and two parts sanctify -
That family is beautiful and temporary.

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