To His Yard

A Poem

By Cara Shelton | 2011

There was once a time in which you
were not a unit, existing apart from a whole --
untouched, uncut, free of pink plastic flamingos and me,
the man who buries poison in your pores.
You were immeasurable before the day I came and decided
you're better suited separated from yourself and spotted
by heavy structures composed of more pieces of you
mixed with pieces of me.

I claimed ownership of you in the same manner that
a rabbit tosses a leash around a bear's neck and tucks
daffodils behind his ears and feeds him berries and herbs,
but wishes he'd just do it on his own.
But the bear always growls and his stomach grumbles, and
you turn brown, or grow too tall, or accumulate
plastics and papers that I did not thoughtfully place
in your kindly apportioned sections that indicate that
you do not
belong to
you.

When I kick my ambitions and your leash to our curb,
they will come tromping through your chest-high
crab grass, crying over your rebelliousness
and my faultiness, and they will beg for the green
paper that lets me call you mine.
You are not good enough for them.
You are too much and never enough for me,
but you are too quiet to be on your own in
the manner in which you began.

At the of the day, I join you outside
and attempt to reconcile with all that is inevitable, when
I look up at the sky and curse your coordinates
for not letting me see the stars for what they are.
I have trimmed you and I have fed you.
I have dressed you in lights and statues
and I have shelled out all that my earthly life
is worth to call you mine, to be not impoverished, to lie in your arms.

After the sun sets, after I have ensured your beauty,
all I want is to sit on my bench, smoke a cigar, and
look at the stars in the place where my comfort
and yields locate me -- not far from a composite
board and polyester box lined with metal
brains and plastic bodies and all the responsibilities
of a man who has his own piece of earth, and
where the stars are easily confused with dust
catching flickers of light and a multitude of steel
birds blinking blinking to tell us they're alright.

I sit here, stogy threatening to burn callused knuckles,
cradled in your bosom from my heels to my double
crown and I wonder with all the strength it takes to
stab a pink plastic flamingo into your stubborn flesh,
if it is possible to toss a leash around the stars and
have a yard of them that is my own.