Almost anyone, I guess, can rent booth-space,
but this year whoever assigned it
thinks in odd logic: Planned Parenthood
with its calmly catastrophic population charts
squeezed between Right-to-Life
posters of bloody embryos screaming MURDER
and Mary Kay Cosmetics’ amazing-one-time offer
for a fabulous-free-complete makeover.
On the way there in our red sports car
that topped a hundred thousand miles this summer
and now rattles like a fossil, you said,
“We were going to talk again in a week
about having kids. It’s been two weeks,”
not saying that each week we wait
means more risk, physical risk,
unlike my fear, airy and ineffable.
Above the wind and clunking universal joint,
I caught the moon rising in a sky
of clear steel blue, and tried to describe to you
the hawks I had seen that afternoon
gliding on the air drafts.
They were so still with their wings stretched
they looked like vicious insignia
on some robber baron’s escutcheon,
and they circled for so long-three of them—
I half-began to think I was the one
they were hunting. Any minute, I thought,
they’ll tuck their wings and plummet,
but the death it meant, that caught my throat,
wasn’t mine but yours, and I snapped back to daylight
inside a glimmer of what that would feel like,
and when I found you weeding the garden
you looked up and asked, “What’s happened?”
There didn’t seem to be a single couple
on the fairgrounds with less than six children
under ten, or three under five,
or an infant in arms and themselves
still children, starch-fat and dirt-poor,
bobbling loads of midway junk,
clumps of fried dough, corn dogs on sticks,
drifting by pitchmen’s gravelly raps,
grinning or yawning, maybe forgetting a minute
the bills, the bounced check, the food stamps.
We rested on a bench, muted because of them,
ignoring the clamor of our own wants.
A bunch of pre-teens from a local dance school
in lamé tights and glittered nails and faces
began a chorus line on a plywood platform
as a pair of archaic bell-shaped speakers
popped and crackled “Girls Just Want To Have Fun.”
Steps half-matched, twirls begun too late,
it was less like dancing than a forced march-in-place
sort-of-in-time to the banging cadence of the music.
The mothers who had helped them practice
for months in front of every mirror in the house
were easy to pick out. They were marching, too,
almost imperceptibly, mouthing a song
one of them might remember
without knowing where it came from
out on her evening walk or watering the lawn
when her daughter has grown daughters
already starting families of their own.
“You forgot your free makeover,” I said driving home,
and, smiling, you reached over and pinned my hand to the horn.
County Fair
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