Shirt
Joseph Millar

The last day of 2008 I woke
 wearing the same blue shirt I wore
 driving down through the pines
 to hear Carlos Santana,
 the hills a pale brown near Vallejo
 where Bill Graham's helicopter crashed
 in the power lines over the marshland（沼泽地） .

The shirt hung on a shovel¹ near Big Sur
 smelling of almonds and sulfur²
 where I sat one morning reading Chuang Tzu
 trying to understand about the Tao.
 I wore it to feed Amy's chickens
 and wrapped its loose arms
 around my wife, who was smoking
 outside by the mailbox, having swallowed
 a fragment of glass in her coffee
 the Advice Nurse said was most likely harmless,
 trusting the colon's pulses to pass it
 moment by moment.

We drove back north through Golden Gate Park
 where an alligator³（短吻鳄） once escaped
 into the pond just off Lincoln Drive
 and where Michael Bloomfield OD'd in his car
 near the hall of flowers
 and the Grateful Dead played for free.

We'd like to see them come back again,
 the way Mickey Rourke showed up
 at the Academy Awards interview
 for his role as a broken-down wrestler⁴
 walking the two roads of grief and hilarity⁵（欢喜，高兴） ,
 the cat's eye ring on his finger,
 his silver tooth, his rat-goatee
 and wraparound（概括的） shades,
 weeping into his water glass
 mourning his dead Chihuahua:
 I swear I'd give him the shirt off my back.