You Own It

For your birthday, I’m learning to pop champagne corks

with a cossack sword when all you asked for was world peace.

I’m actioning the deliverables to wish you many happy returns

of the ecstasies that are imminent when all you requested

was a contentment so quiet it’s inaudible. Remember when

I gave you a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle?

When all you desired was to turn from what was finished and hard

in the darkness. And when you said I gave you what I wanted

myself  I gave you what I didn’t want: gift certificates to spas

that wax hearts, a blind date with the inventor of friction.

Today I bring an actual-size sunrise and many glow words

from the inmates of  this late-stage civilization who navigate

in your slipstream and to whom you say keep rowing.

When you were born you were placed on a small throne on castors

while the Stop Shopping Choir sang hosannas, a defining

moment. People noticed something nascent about you

that persists in your fondness for the first person primordial.

You own it. You know why voices die in throats

and trees struggle in silence: the deepest trauma cannot

spare a sound. If you meet a mystery you do not disturb it

with little picks and suction things. You say the shape

of  happiness is too fine for capture spray, and it is well

to remember the days when plastic boxes snapping shut were all

that women had to celebrate. Yet it is not seditious to rebel

against a culture like circus music, so cheerful

we’d need a cadaver tendon to fix it. That’s what

you say. You are hard to fathom as a guttering compass

that is neither hush nor howl. I’m thinking of  the time

you placed an Aeolian harp in the window, took me

by the notebook, and asked me to consider why

turkeys bob their heads when they walk and geese don’t

though they both waddle. You watched my ethereality show

and commiserated when they adorned my rival

in a deconsecrated rosary bead bikini and send her to St. Barts

while I was remaindered to an orange jumpsuit organ-swiping plot.

That century I was betrayed by a dedicated icemaker,

you burned a feather pen to revive me. You tried

my device that prevents accidental workplace nudity, vetted

its magnetic veils, and at Christmas sent fruitcake

privacy filters. Remember when I was dismissed as overness

consultant? How you resigned in solidarity and grew

a sky-colored flower since I could not be satisfied

with the sky itself? You gave me a robe of  black silk that floats

and does not rustle and advised me to turn from what was finished

and hard in the darkness. If  I critiqued the treasure revealer

you said do not test its softness against your cheek.

Today I raise my glass of wheat grass and atmospheric information

to wish you every beyond of  thought in which to consider

all that is majorly good. I won’t sing Happy Birthday,

a song so overdetermined it sounds bereaved.

I’ll sing of  passions that persist in the Elysian Fields.

Though shackled to a boulder at the moment, I’m unpacking

boxes from your last move, wrapping the contents

in recycled moonlight and presenting them to you

as objects exactly forgotten and largely

what you wanted. I nerve myself  for the encounter.