Maybe the body I prefer sits between two singing birds, like the song
itself. Because people are used to comparing women and songs,
maybe it’s necessary to say, I’m not. I’m interested in the communal making
of like things, which happens to be a song in this instance.
Or the scent after one rosemary bush as I approach another I
cloned from the first. I don’t like rosemary. I love the thing I can make
again and again from itself. The way, for two years, every chicken
is a golden goose. Collect the eggs. Then you eat it.
I used to think it was brutal, how Lolo lost his fingers at the Hitachi
factory, but he lived long enough to collect SSI. People I admire
believe we can survive the number of days before
retirement. Really I tried, but it only takes one coworker death
to lose faith in your pension. Every day after, I obsessed
over how easy it should be to survive an office building. Connect this
to what we know about time. Every minute I’m happy now
makes me happy later. Mom’s best friend used to report all the days
Dad spent at the beach. When she sold the beach condo, she said,
Maybe Bill got it right. I mean, he never kept any money
but he got to spend a lot of days at the beach. After
she could no longer distinguish between Mom’s face and mine,
she’d talk to me about the beach she missed and Bill, whom she remembered.