Make Believe

We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America

I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead

of the murky yellow of my upbringing.

She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flower bed,

her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests

dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses.

Precisely, the lit up jackrabbits appear in peculiar blue candor

under the stoplight dusk,

pigeons hued reddish are garrulous and incomprehensible as drunks

at the end of the cocktail hour.

It’s that time in America when the air is overgrowth.

The piquancy of coriander neighbors allowed to flower mingles

with fragrances we douse our clothes-lined laundry in each week

to cloister the body’s reeking.

Truck smoke from the interstate.

I’m out-of-doors, which is to say nature is hemmed in by doors, which is to say

nature is a category of my making, and I can’t say why the skittish,

black bugs flit into the house when there’s so much turf afforded them already,

but tonight I’ll crush a few with a Newsweek before sleeping.

Now, it’s that time in America in the out-of-doors beneath tree and trellis

and vapor trails of overnight flights

fare-thee-welling to London and Morocco.

Brandy in soda water, a xylophone jingle of the ice, I sit in my Adirondack

without my minute, Midwestern wife

who Tuesday returns from her summit in Cleveland.

It’s that time when I’m alone in America with my young daughter who startles

herself realizing the woodpile beneath that black oak is itself formerly a tree,

and she wants to know whether these trees have feelings.

It’s this acquaintance with death she so improves upon annually.

It’s in this precise moment in America that I realize this acquainting, this becoming

familiar, this cordiality with death is the entire task of her growing older.

Next year her ficus will die and the next year her minnow will die,

and it’s in these moments in America

when my daughter’s plump lip quivers in a preface to bawling,

when I’m alone and can do too little, I say,

I’m sorry life is too much, my love, I’m sorry my love, it isn’t enough.

Source: Phantom Camera (New Issues Press, 2013)