Eleven, Pennsylvania
The neighbors’ chatter
and bagpipes practicing
over a wiffleball argument
were lazily percolating outside
in the shadowy yards
that summer night when
I was eleven in Pennsylvania.
After dinner for some reason,
I was sent to bed early
for trying to grow up
in a crooked country,
where the President lied
to our family on TV.
My father is cutting the grass
with an old hand mower and
thinking about ordinary
two-stroke burning of
gasoline and dulled blades.
​
Sycamores murmured. Sunflowers lilted.
We had planted ourselves in May,
and now we were as tall as the eaves,
waiting to be cut into October.
There were ten thousand
branches and bugs in the trees.
​
That evening, I lived a long day
of eleven years, and tried to sleep
in a slant of guilty light. I must
have done something worthy
of solitary—like drive mother crazy
or utter some blasphemy
of the century, or think dark
thoughts in public
like a bad Catholic.
​
Tree top secrets of mad
ideas were buzzing off into
America’s disgraced August
in a golden shell of dried
dirt and dust. It was a crowded
night in a lonesome room.
Busy insects of concerted
rattling in America’s ears
changed tenses of life and death
We were nothing but flimsy
wings shaking spirits out
of our bodies,
​
like they said Jesus did, if I had
thought of Jesus, katydid,
and the cicadas trading fours, katydid
the jazzy circadian cicadas,
going dizzy in the summer night, katydid
and we not far away, just inside,
somewhere down the road
a smooth, elegant connoisseur,
enjoying the shakin’ cicadas
to shake out of it, katydid,
before gone are the cicadas,
before the summer of empty
bodies, katydid, and comes a bitter fall
of the humid, sweet end of days.