Disambiguation

a poem

I ask it for a lobsterman
you know like
oilskins, sou’wester,
salty beard and long-stemmed pipe

And it returns a shiny, reddish,
two-legged beast with eyes on stalks
staring down a weathered dock
its claws up like it just scrubbed in
for a long shift at sea

A lobster-man!
I clap my hands
(my clacking lobster-woman hands)
and stoop to pat my robot’s head
and choose not to correct it
but to drift into its daydream
land of flaming men in firetrucks
where Monarchs swarm the skies
as flapping happy butter sticks

I live there anytime
my daughter twirls and yells
— the floor is spinning!

Or when I ask my color eyes
and she declares
triumphant
— white!

Or when I ask her how her best friend
made her laugh today at school
and she says
— like this: Ha ha ha!

And I know I myself in childhood
once named a Mallard
Pecker
while my aunt just slapped
the steering wheel
with wheezy watering eyes

But the whole joke chokes up
curdles
when I type my next request
for an image of a person
“in a wheelchair, realistic”
picturing Carson Tueller’s dimples
Stephen Hawking’s blue cravat

And instead this little art engine
that could repaint the western canon
if it wanted to
makes a grid of candid portraits
of panhandling amputees

Garbage in and garbage out
of the mouths of babes

And I know that if I’m honest
I was raised on garbage too
because even though I got my facts
from dial-up Encarta
and I knew that Helen Keller
could speak fluent Greek and Latin
and I watched Lieutenant Dan
sail that shrimp boat through the storm

I still thought a girl on crutches
swinging down the library stairs
couldn’t learn like other kids
and the ones in ESL
would never read or long divide
and I never knew till recently
when I saw him at a playground
pushing his own son on a swing
and not catching my greeting
as my daughter toddled past
that the fourth grade boy
who’d shouted words
so loud and oafishly
was only ever
(no one told me)
very hard of hearing