Stephanie Burt

We have had our lives. The reservoir visible In the window beside our elbows, and the willow Branches trailing at our stop Are the nature we leave Behind us gladly, since it has no place For all we have recently learned: that sex Is temporary, help Ours to hand down now, and materials science Not the only kind. We thank Calm, careful Minerva, goddess Of adults, who for so many years took us To school: her voice the timbre of fretless bass, Her eyes the color of pencil lead, she taught Us how to behave in order to have our rewards In twenty years. We have them, and if we wish Too often, this fall, to have led another life We do not mean that we would give up ours: Though we stand in a row and sway Before an obstructed view, we are able to find Initials outlined in the crosshatched trees, And pebbles—calculi—around our ponds And cherish them; we like to watch the roads Along which the perennial pollen sifts down As finely as ever, making a soft powder Of brass amid the troughs in softball fields. Our skills are finally in demand. If you mock us, Pan, In whom we also believe, do it As gently as you can.

Complete in ourselves, we look like scraps of paper anyway: left alone, we could tell our mothers and one another our owners’ flimsiest secrets and play together all day until we became intertwined, which is why you try to keep us permanently apart. One of us is a gossamer pirate ship, a frigate whose rigging the industrial sunset highlights, sail by oblong sail. Another resembles a Greek letter —gamma, or lambda; others still a ligature, a propeller, a fat lip. Our will is not exactly the wind’s will. Underlined by sand, whose modes of coagulation and cohabitation none of the human pedestrians understand, we take off on our almost arbitrarily lengthy singletons of string towards the unattainable, scarily lofty realm of hawk and albatross and stay, backlit by cirrocumulus. It seems to be up to you to keep us up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross.

1 I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order. I didn’t mail myself like a letter some other kids already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb without any glue. I didn’t have any permission. 2 There was a snowstorm that lasted three days and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a pencil-and-paper game where the object was to figure out the object of the game. There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar, and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different since they all started out black and white, and all the same. 3 O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look, up there on the uneven climbing bars, too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring, the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors and thin swings that make no decision, like weathervanes. O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.

You were whiny and socially unacceptable even to loud young men whose first criterion for rock and roll was that it strike someone else as awful and repulsive and you told grim stories about such obscure affairs as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge- laden marathon runner from Zanzibar who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate sarcastic showtunes abject similes feel like a piece of burnt black toast for example threaded on a rusty wire followed up by spitting too much time to think by fusillades from rivetguns by cold and awkward bronze reverberant church bells percussive monotones 4/4 all for the five or six consumers who enjoyed both the impatience of youth and the pissiness of middle age as if you knew you had to get across your warnings against all our lives as fast as practicable before roommate or friend could get up from a couch to turn them off We barely remember you in Minnesota we love our affable Replacements who modeled a more acceptable form of rage who thought of girls and cities boys and beds and homes and cars as flawed but fixable with the right drink right mates and right guitar strings whereas you did not and nothing in your songs resolved except in a certain technical sense as a drill resolves contests between drywall and screw Your second bassist took the stage name Flour your second drummer copied a machine Somebody else in your hometown took credit for every sound you taught them how to use I write about you now since nobody else is likely to and since even appalled too-serious flat compliments like these are better than nothing and because to annoy perseverate and get under everyone's skin beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world which is to fade into silence entirely which will never happen to The Ice Machine to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown in the eyes of any audience that is I should say not until it happens to me

I can remember when I wanted X more than anything ever—for X fill in from your own childhood [balloon, pencil lead, trading card, shoelaces, a bow or not to have to wear a bow] and now I am moved to action, when I am moved, principally by a memory of what to want. The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are, or to keep your own tools, so that you can pretend. And so it was no surprise, to me at least, when Cooper, who is two, collapsed in fortissimo fits when he could not have a $20, three-foot-long stuffed frog in the image of Frog from Frog and Toad, since he is Toad. That morning, needing a nap, he had thrown, from the third-story balcony of Miller's Cafe and Bakery, into the whistling rapids and shallows of the Ammonoosuc River, with its arrowheads and caravans of stones, his Red Sox cap. His hair was shining like another planet's second sun, as he explained, looking up, "I threw my hat in the river. I would like my hat back now."

A real one wouldn't need one, but the one Nathan draws surely does: four oblongs the size and color of popsicles, green apple, toasted coconut and grape, flanked, two per side, by billowing valentine hearts, in a frame of Scotch tape. Alive, it could stay off the floor, for a few unaerodynamic minutes; thrown as a paper airplane, for one or two more. Very sensibly, therefore, our son gave it something, not to keep it apart from the ground forever, but rather to make safe its descent. When we ask that imagination discover the limits of the real world only slowly, maybe this is what we meant.

(Alec Soth: "Kenny and Bill—Bad Newz, Grand Rapids, Minnesota") They tilt their guitars and stare. Each boy puts one foot toward Us, one where a trailing wire Would run to an amplifier If amplifiers were there. Bill's Gibson glitters like ore. Kenny's Iba ñ ez hoards White noise in its black fretboard. Bill's double chin shows. Is it fair To mention his pudge? Kenny's hair Gets stuck behind one ear. Each of the brothers wears A T-shirt, loose jeans, and a pair Of bruised high-tops. A pear- Shaped garbage bag hugs a steel bar. The big rectangular blur Behind them looks like the door To a walk-in refrigerator. Maybe dad is a restaurateur, A diner owner who requires Kenny to spend six hours A week moving cases of beer, While Bill chops potatoes, or scours Grease from the checkerboard floor. Bill imagines a national tour: CBGB's. The Black Cat. Hardcore. Or metal: the glow and allure Of arenas and open-air Pyrotechnics at dusk, a chauffeur. Or do they hope modestly for Sideman jobs, L.A. 'burbs, the secure Work of studio engineers? Two boys hold two guitars In a basement kitchen, and care What you think of them. Next year They promise to practice more. Right now their repertoire Is six songs, seven chords, Five originals, and a spare Reworking of REM's four- Minute anthem about a lost car: "Can't Get There from Here."

If you don't get too close to people you can't disappoint them, which would be so much worse than letting them disappoint you. To the extent that you gain a perch that means other people look up to you, to just that extent you can never tell them how you feel. You can warble, or follow a siren, or a Shenandoah vireo, into the shade, or take advice from the lights: be a child, or be like a child. You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.

What will survive us has already begun Oak galls Two termites’ curious self-perpetuating bodies Letting the light through the gaps They lay out their allegiances under the roots of an overturned tree Almost always better to build than to wreck You can build in a wreck Under the roots of an overturned tree Consider the martin that hefts herself over traffic cones Consider her shadow misaligned over parking-lot cement Saran Wrap scrap in her beak Nothing lasts forever not even the future we want The President has never owned the rain