You Can’t Build a Child

with the medicinal poppies of June nor with Celan’s bloom-fest of dredged stone, not with history’s choo-choo train of corpses, not with Nottingham’s Robin Hood nor Antwerp’s Diamondland. Not walking on the Strand in Manhattan Beach with her silicone breast implants, refinery, waves of trash, not out of the Library of Alexandria with her burnt gardens that prefigure gnarly, barnacle-laden surfboards broken in half. You can’t build the child with the stone paths that we have walked on through the atmosphere, the pirate’s plank, the diving board, the plunge, nor with the moon whether she be zombie or vampire. Not with Delphi, not with fangs, or cardamom bought in Fez, red with spring, red with marathon running cheeks. Not with monk chant, bomb chant, war paint, not with the gigantic Zen pleasure zones, nor with this harnessed pig on the carousel that I am sitting on with my son in Nice, France. How it burns on its axis as if it were turning into pineapple-colored kerosene the way the Hawaiian pig, apple in snout, roasts in its own tropical meat under the countdown sun.