Balloon

It didn’t happen in that order—

the endless growl of what will turn out to be

miniature quad and trail bikes, carried along

the top of the valley and rumbling its contents:

small kids with helmets weighing more than their heads,

ragged on by parents with crossed arms and ambition

in their eyes: round and round the drone of fun.

A country pursuit. Tracy tells me a professor

of economics at a local city university

while praising capitalism says he will only

listen to opposition if it comes from one

who eats only lentils, has given up cars

and eschews imported brands of foodstuffs. Lentils?

Contradictions aside, I’ll take him on, though

it might be hard to hear me speak above the junior

quad-bike circus performing along the hills. But hark,

I’ll tell you something unusually usual: at dusk

wandering the block with Katherine we came across

shreds of chemical-pink balloon with plastic string

attached to its tied-off umbilical cord, clearly

an escapee from a party, the child—her name

decorating the balloon with three crosses for kisses—

in tears, chasing it up into the sky, watching

it drift over the hills, her letter to the world

a single word and her mark made over. Katherine

asks if I recall the balloons her class back in England

released with school name and address and how one

floated all the way over the Channel and on to Belgium

where another child picked up the shreds and deciphered

the message and wrote back; weather balloons, “hopes

and ambitions” as Delmore says, but without doubt

or skepticism, in full expectation they will land

somewhere far away and bring joy to the finder.

I throw the shred of balloon away, fearing

an animal crossing the block in the dark,

night-eyed and keenly sampling the ground

and the air with its snout, will reread or misread

the code of chemical pinkness, and like some Red

Riding Hood in reverse, choke on the gift of chance.