It says 1921 in the picture
And I am smiling
But it’s not me anymore
Or maybe it never was

          Green, how I want you green.
                                                             —Lorca

I am sorry I let you down
I was writing this poem
In the middle of everything
The way they wanted it 

Everyone had the same IKEA bed.
                 She tied my wrists to hers, above my head.
 
(She liked what she called “clean lines,” I would learn;
                 her major had been architecture.)

is about you: not about your father who mildly streams you
down your years. I pretend a knowing of your skin or,
beneath it, the wells of yourself, over the time it took
you here.

Somewhere between silversmith and potter
he demonstrated how he works, with his wheel
pulling the material in and shaving it away into a hole in the center
what he’s making, utensils, small parts, hard to say
when Drusilla, pale from a costume drama, sashays over

I wore my yellow sundress in a little depression
the asphalt like pumice, broken in imitation of nature,
on the phone when you came by, I sensed you were about to say
Do you know how much I’ve loved you and I said, Oddly yes
but have been baffled as to why

But having braked all the way to the floor of the valley
it dawned on us the slope we’d have to climb
and it was night, you on the back of my bike
we’d passed the place that burned down—the people
rich enough to continue to produce some kind

These girls riding bareback on their palominos down the slopes
what do they know, I thought
then I saw a train that collided with a convoy
of trucks, each vehicle and each car interlocking at precisely

The two or three times I saw Lil Wayne
hanging out at the Praline Connection

in New Orleans he had a mouth full of bling
covered in forkfuls of greens or green beans

or white rice & red beans on a tongue
of strange lucrative grammar

The answer will be that which allows
the best possible future when the plaintiffs come

before the judge or the farmers
before the king it is not that which incurs unrest