There is no longer autumn in Akron, Ohio.
Leaves willingly turn overnight from green
to death. This is how we grow old.
According to last week’s dinner companions
last summer’s drought has blocked
the so-called process of photosynthesis,
the mutating struggle to replace cells.
About this and how marriage
won’t turn our young heads gray
our grade schools lied. They told us Venus
would be visible, that California never crashed
into Utah one Friday night forming the Sierras,
that Columbus was a great white man.
All sexual disease, replied Coach Beerbelly,
could be cured. We became the unlucky ones.
The Pledge of Allegiance became less fashionable
and rigid Bon Jours! to Madame What’s Her Name
harbored nagging doubts. Wall Street made fathers
glow as they moved from parked cars to hotels.
Everything was perfect: the endless library shelves,
the frenzy to divide and dissect, the pleasures
of our paved playgrounds. We thought we could slay Nero
and in turn be slain, heroes’ deaths,
narratives read aloud a thousand million times
turning meekly into sitcoms of smoking guns
and faulty coffins, moving us offstage,
handcuffed, passive victims prone to inbreeding,
more eager now to live with beautiful nurses
named Sophia, ivory clasping their dry bosoms
as they roll us down to the bottom of the hill.
With the help of court-appointed translators
at dusk we eat darkness and sing “Arrivederci, Roma.”
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