November 13, 2009; Saddlehorn Road, Entrada, Phoenix, Arizona; 8:06 AM

To The Storialist, whose poems give me joy, whoever and wherever you may be.

A lawn of golden leaves—
a Honda soaped with wedding vows—

a businessman in his driveway steering one last 'copter ride
with remote control before taking off for work—

kids in tribal bunches that dissolve to greater grapes
as the yellow bus arrives—

images, images, images.

Any one of these could leap at any time,
for any reason, into my past

when all that life is
had been finally figured out:

why white can go with blue,
and frogs make funny sounds,
and girls and boys destroy each other's toys.

Connecting back this jigsaw puzzle photo
is not a task for ordinary Gods

when we're told how everything we know is wrong
by thoughts in air that one can never see;

it's only information in some womb
that gestates in our minds
in the hope one day it may become: a real boy.

It wants us to pretend, that we've forgotten

the way the firelight smelled,
the secrets in the closet,
the photos that would never go away.