The school year Mrs. Gerner was our den mother she had
a nightclub act at a midtown hotel with a horseshoe bar
She practiced with her partner during cub scout meetings
while we cut and pasted construction paper teepees
for wildlife badges and completed our outdoor worksheets
Her partner, Juliette, played the piano and Mrs. Gerner sang
Her son, Bobbie, often explained that Mr. Gerner traveled
on airplanes and was looking for a house in Pittsburgh
Bobbie was the only cub scout who lived in an apartment
and owned a pair of binoculars and a championship yoyo
The architect had drawn the apartments three in a row
with vaulted roofs, red bricks, cement stoops, nine windows
in each building, nine panes in each window, each with paper
shades pulled down, faux white shutters, pine trees never planted
The architect’s signed drawings hung in the entry of each building
which will explain a man’s memory and a boy’s reality,
given that the following October the acorns dropped early
and Bobbie Gerner didn’t come back to school
Which doesn’t explain why a passerby twenty years later
doesn’t see children as one might have seen them then,
hands on each side of their faces, noses and foreheads
pressed hard against window panes, looking out into frost,
waiting patiently for Bobby Gerner’s mother to return
and finally award them their insignias, their Wolf badges,
the promises made to them as children by people like Mrs. Gerner
who so carelessly leave their trash in the hallways of deceit