Flag Day

The flags flew in the wind and I saluted.

We’d just moved out, my family, the lot of us,

from one country into another. I failed

to understand the consequence.

The flags clapped like the wind. I spent each yellow

bus ride attempting to count toward infinity.

My fellow children told me I was weird

and couldn’t speak their language skillfully

enough for freeze tag. I replied   you’re welcome,

meaning   please. Dear freckle-dotted, bowl-haired

adversaries who chased me merrily in tartan vests

around the shrubbery, chanting USSR

go home!  in dissonant harmony: where did you

move, the lot of you? Each Flag Day, single file,

we strutted through the playground with French horns

and out-of-tune clarinets, some holding poles

aslant, like knights with spears, others saluting.

Nostalgia is a pathological sickness. Photographed,

I am as quiet as an apple approaching the mouth.

In the Pavilion of Din, my skull stays a silence.

The customs agent palmed the wedding ring

my mother had neglected to declare, unfastened

one gold Leo from a chain around her throat,

and called it contraband. My mother clasped

the thin residual chain, transporting it

over meridians in her breast pocket. Flags

danced drunkenly across the darkling field,

unspooled their languid torsos listlessly

into the limpid sky of possibility. I spent

every quarter I palmed from my mother

on yellow eggs in the store’s prize machine.

One had a plastic ring inside. I handed it

to my impassive mother as she steered

a cart overloaded with staples: detergent,

Snapple. One heavy flag, unflappable,

ginormous, bore down its shadow over her, then me,

a consequence, a language, an infinity.