To Explain Things

Decades ago my dad was a short-order cook.
He says it amounted to
the commotion of one thing burning
just as you’re readying something else.

He turns his head this way and that
as we walk down 24th
and says youth
and makes a face I can’t explain.

Living he says is so hard on anyone
(as we turn a corner)
and that’s why we need
you poets to explain things—

at this the poet feels 
confused, elated, unsure
for he does not (he feels) explain
so much as audit a spectacle in the insane wind

tearing through a city
he’s like a little wild parrot
who zags and wheels and stops to balance 
on the feed-arm of a satellite dish.