I have to question the wisdom

of telling my niece GE stands for God Engine:

a mystical device, a suspended animator

that keeps strawberries plump and peaches

fuzzy as fly-dotted pears rot,

corpse-soft on the table.

I imagine the amphibian drifting

on a lily pad down the Puddle Styx.

Maybe I covet youth’s fantasies

that spring up like wolfberries.

Why else would I lie?

Maybe I’m the cruel uncle,

forcing her to prepare a shoebox casket

and line the sides with wads of tissue

crumpled damp with tears.

When the burial plot is smoothed over,

I drag a trowel across my jeans

until it shines enough to reflect

the lines multiplying on my face

and consider telling her the truth:

all will reach the pear’s destination,

decay is a constant ferryman, and if forgotten,

everything in this freezer will burn.

Paper Frog on Spring

Paper Frog on Spring

Green begins to stain trees again,

dark-eyed juncos invade branches.

The sun sears sky, while children

with their horrible grins fill playgrounds

where dugouts face off like foxholes

and the fences do nothing.

Bats are dragged through gravel.

Brims of helmets shade eyes.

Imagine if it happened every year,

if every April, from any window, friends

dissolved, ran down into storm drains,

or were absorbed by the greedy lawns.

What if annually you relived the waning

of a life in spring?

The resurrection rituals:

barbecues, birthday parties,

saplings that shatter soil,

emerging from some grave full of us.

Thinking Like a Split Melon

Thinking Like a Split Melon

In a sixth grader’s notebook

only two lines are written:

I go outside. I look at the stars.

Then I’m sad because of death and stuff—

At a funeral when I was her age, I punched

dots into the program with a bow

compass then held it to the light

to trace paths I drew between holes.

Those constellations. The paths

drawn between neurons. Their firing

is how I think.

She adds in pencil

the castle of the mind is full

of hundreds of bright specters—

and I wonder what’s going on in her head

and mine. What sky did we fall from?

sounds like an appropriate question,

when I think about it

but it’s too much to ask a child, right?

Outside, I ask a steel sculpture

ascending from the depths

of museum grass if I am

contextualized by its immensity.

The bending blades of grass

told me it’s not appropriate

to ascribe words—

which become ideas,

and soon become my ideas—

to them, as they’ve done nothing wrong.

The wind says

nothing

we can’t figure out on our own,

I said, but no one was talking to me.

A melon falls from a bag,

a platoon of ants pours in

and out of its gash,

and I wonder if it takes being broken

open and emptied

to be filled with something new.