They did this to us, but then we kept doing it,
Too. Moved by more than continuity, the song
Loops too fast to get off, a teacup at the carnival
In mid-eighties amusement, a national distraction
From bad appetites and statecraft. Math falters
At the door to a militant paternal ear-drum,
Then re-enters with the tutor on the eve of
A very big retrieval. In the video, everyone is
Instructed to say their name and yours. Love
Adds an inch and a year to your life. You held
Guns in a battlefield, and I shot trash at Jewish
Summer-camp. The family home bursts for
The holiday, a map of sleeping bodies laid out
Across the ottomans. Awake more than usual,
Conjugated by mood, I search all the bedrooms,
And I beg you, passionately, to be with me in
The insanity of balancing all this effort on a choice.
Traffic enacts a contrast with the messages
Coming into your lap. The event, in its prolific
Sensibility, asks why it is so difficult to share;
Why kids can multiply, freely, in love, but not us;
And is this voluntary intolerance, this failure to
Learn infinity from children, the reason we keep
Pushing the commune in Nesodden deeper
Into fiction. You are far; you are conquered in
A car seat. In the rush for immediacy, I wish to
Download this background as sacrament, and
Dissolve it on your tongue at the swim club.
Currency never invented anything. But all that
Cash on the table did something, dilating the room,
Dialing up the volume of possibility, so that
By the time I left, I couldn’t hear much else,
Or fully get back from the house.