A Burning Poem

When everything folds in on itself
like a freshly laundered black bath towel
(I picture before me the faces
of my unborn children—
both boys—
their mouths hanging open as they watch me
climb from the wrecked car,
or the oldest one’s simple relaxed pleasure
as he plays his trombone on our brown
living room couch,
or the watermelon-sized thing in my stomach
the day I have to explain wet dreams)
I hope there will be some signpost
(when she takes deep breaths near the bowl of apricots
she sneezes without fail)
or word balloon maybe
(in the mail this day I happily open
my first AARP newsletter. It is surprisingly
well put-together, and folded with an intense precision.
I thought this would be more depressing.)
that somehow encapsulates what this whole damn thing
was about, why there were so many
(a winter sky has never been so blue as this crisp morning)
comings and goings and crude botched plans,
(the stethoscope is cold, like a pen left in a car,
but she is nice. I like nice doctors. Her long brown hair
and puffy cheeks say she is too young for me,
but sometimes I still wonder; I wonder
if she knows she smells so nice or that she
should go fuck people before she dries like the rest of us)
so many unsaid miracles of devotion.
(when Norah, my youngest granddaughter, asks me
how grasshoppers work, I tell her what I know,
which isn’t much. We walk a bit more through the tall browning grass,
stopping before we get too close to the creek.
Her parents tell me to keep her away from the creek,
which is fine by me. I hate mosquitos.
I stop by the old Spruce and tell her how
when I was thirty-four I climbed this tree
with her grandmother and we kissed in a glowing sunset
and how then, as now, the night smelled like new milk,
still steaming from a cow’s insides)