Truth Beauty

Beauty is Truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.  — Keats

They’ve long since repaired the hole
in the storm door across the street
that was left when the big man
tossed the stone at his screaming wife standing on the porch.

It left a star shaped hole
that reminded me of the holes
we used to stomp into iced over puddles
in the parking lot of the neighborhood market.

Once, I saw Eddie Hope try to skate on one of the big ones
and his skate caught on one of those holes.
He bled all over the ice
and we laughed and laughed while he cussed us out

in eight year old terms with a handful of words he’d learned
from his big brother.  Both Eddie and his brother were dead
within years of that — Tommy from heroin,
Eddie from being dragged down the street

by a car that never stopped.  I think about them both a lot
even now as I see the house across the street,
the white fragile ice on the street,
hear the sound of brakes on the street —

the street that goes both ways.

Here’s what I know on this earth:  I love me some stars, love me
the sound of ice breaking,
see a little truth in the way things break.
Any stain is beautiful and honest

both at once.  A kid dies and an old man somewhere can’t forget
how he kept driving one night a long ago, following his usual path home
to his own kids and how he hugged them hard that night.
They still recall the hug.

Over at the house across the street
the couple who tried to kill each other
in June are apparently happy for now.
It’s getting cold as we get deep into November.

They paved our street this summer
and it’s clean as a slate, all downhill, no place
for a puddle to form,
but I’ll lay odds we’ll be prone to black ice.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
Someone’s gonna crash,
something’s gonna break,
someone’s gonna rise up.