Didn’t it all feel easier when you were younger,
the longer evenings, diluted summer
endings, no need to know
you could reassemble memory
later?—fold it into some other summer,
just a few of the right creases
and paper becomes
lotus blossom becomes pterodactyl
becomes a fortune-teller, each season
another halved sheet of loose leaf.
There’s no real need to know all that,
but now you know
a little somehow about having
more than you need.
Need. It’s necessary.
Even those who claim they don’t, do.
Never mind all that circular reasoning
within your definition. Reconcile
with the fact of growing up
in the dugouts of Softball City,
around aging men who smoked grass
and played drunk to feel like boys again,
no thoughts aimed toward a future
and what it might present.
Maybe if you had picked up a guitar
before seventeen, maybe reading all of Auden
in your twenties, maybe some goals, focus,
though a second guess
is still just stabbing blind
as the possibilities dance and weave.
Acquisition of new territory;
the past has a mind of its own. Those days
it took a whole summer to finally forget
everything from the last year
and a whole year to learn to believe
in it returning again.
The family Dodge had 80,000 miles on it
that summer it finally sold, and who knows
now where all those miles came from,
all that so-called time?
A tire can either be a swing or a spare
depending on who you ask and when.
You could keep time to the answers.
You could spend years in therapy
locating your inner child’s stubbed toe.
You can only embrace time in the past tense,
after the hill flattens out—if it does.
Perhaps the boy is too smart for his own good—
quadratic equations that look like arithmetic,
memorization of the Vicksburg phonebook—What if
the kid isn’t one for long enough?
Misunderstanding from adults and children both.
Things never happen fast enough,
and when they do the throttle breaks,
breaks off in the hand, and zoom.
Schubert composed string quartets,
symphonies, and a three-act opera
in his teens—and they call that
“an extraordinary childhood aptitude
for music.” That’s one way of describing it.
Unfuckingbelievable is another way.
You can almost forgive Salieri his insanity,
forgive the notes their perfect pitch,
forgive the pupils for being geniuses.
