For Sale
In the spectacular town where I live, the sun offers
forty-two medicines every hour and I’ve
never been somewhere
as intricately cinnamon or poised. Most people here talk
of planets and divisions
of retrograde. We all need excuses. I don’t
have even limited knowledge
of astrology, so I just now Googled
and learned the sun controls ego and self, and today
my husband quit his job with the angry
realtor who runs in and out of his downtown
office and stages his frustration
about bank details as he jiggles
cold keys. My sweetest left him an invoice and Sorry, I’m done
with this attitude in the perfect cursive
he’s used since fourth grade, then got in his truck and went
to the corner for fuel. Saw a homeless man squatting
in a small diameter with a gas can
and guitar, a grin. My man filled that little tin tank
and drove Carl across the street. Carl wants to start
a circus, my sweetest tells me, and I think we all want
to conjure new ways to loop
from daily rituals, the muscle of pandemonium
and anger surrounding our heavy times. Want bold
enchantment, the sugar of thickened color. Across town, right then
I was at the gym: left, right, obedient
core, and after, in the locker room, talking easy
to a woman changing into a robin’s egg
blue swimsuit. We savored tales of the waists
of our gardens, my slow timid
aspens with their tiny gold bells. She said she had extra Theves
poplars and do I want them. Yes, I want them, I
said, because I need tall
and stable in this life. After all, isn’t there always a cannon
of news? To evade it, I again go online
learning what seems ridiculous: ranks
of sentences. Declarative, imperative,
interrogative, exclamatory. The very substance
of dare, of wound, beginning. No one knows
which bends the most. In my rural village, a neighbor is selling
tiki torches (10) and bottles
of fuel; someone else has a picture of multiple
tires on Craigslist. Everyone is selling
something to someone. Everything is switching
hands. Did you know there is new violence
in Gaza, people throwing burning tires and rocks? How we tell time
has a perimeter. Around us, shifting
performers. An open air prison. Filled with its sentences.