And Then Came the Day

And then came the day when we had written enough lists, drunk enough serums, procured the perfect rice cooker, been kind

enough to ourselves and our neighbours. Could fit again in the black-mesh, embroidered, bird-of-paradise dress,

could craft a cummerbund, train a wombat to hang, sloth-like, from a sugar maple. The elephants had been transported

from circus to reserve, we’d re-inflated the drowned moon, dredged the pond for our little lost boot. So then we sat,

growing older by breaking open while the knotty grubs processed their way through the planet. There, now. There, there.

The tightrope of striving: end it. We’ve solved heartburn, Sudoku, the quest for Neanderthal art. Now is the time

for a pivot. Darling! Let’s buy something, strap it to the car and go somewhere! Let’s drive with a great gleaming thing

atop our perfect vehicle. Let’s sling butterfly nets from the window like a happy dog’s flapping tongue.

Afterward, let’s go home and lay failure, longing, and some lost cicada husks all belly up on the table.

The house will sink into an architecture of our smallest sorrows, play tour guide to

our own splintering alter egos. Let us let down the blinds of ourselves, build with our two hands

a Trojan rat through which we might crawl back into our smallest true nature. Let us free the ants

from their incessancy. Let us sit on the sloping porch and shrug and say Oh to everything that passes.

Oh to the stroke, Oh to the stork, Oh to the ache Oh to the mutating frog, Oh for the lack, Oh

for the praise-song, Oh for the shark, Oh to the child, Oh to the pathos of a poisoned bird in flight.