Dear Suburb

just a yard as elder earth,

a library of sunflowers

battered by the night’s rain.

When sliced wide, halved at dawn,

I can see how you exist,

O satellite town, your bright possibility

born again in drywall

and the diary with the trick lock.

Hardly held, for years I slept

with my window wide open,

wanting screen-cut threads of rain.

Blind suburb, dear untruth,

you who already know what I mean

when I praise every spared copse,

you were my battery, my sad clue,

but after I mowed the lawn

and watched robins chesting

for seeds I couldn’t resist

what hung in the toolshed,

where, with a pair of garden shears

I cut all the hair from my arms. That need,

that scared need to whiten

or clean a surface: plywood or lawn,

and the spywall behind which I stood,

stock-still, and sinned against

the fly’s flyness. Though you live

inside me, though you laid eggs

in the moisture at the corners

of my eyes, I still dream about

your sinking empire twenty feet above

sea level, and the many things

you never see: beautiful bleached

gas can, tomato posts bent into art,

still looks like a butterfly, etc.