Out here in the suburbs with my daughters my grandchildren my wife
My sons who come to visit often
Wealth beyond the imagining of a Keats or Chatterton
Poets broken by poverty appreciated only posthumously
Out here with the internet and cable television and streaming services
Trying to raise a lawn from the recalcitrant clay
Because neighbors and culture and self-appointed authority demand a lawn
Trimmed clipped tamed mowed and manicured
While all the time the mocking clay shows its ruddy face
I should import a ton of soil from prairie Illinois

But the azaleas go nuts all on their own
Immemorially planted by a real estate developer’s contractors
While a towering pine sprung all on its own before the front porch
Before my eyes a pine grew towering
And down the street the spreading oak majestic in its symmetry
Sliced open for the power lines but thereby revealing its own powerful limbs

And the birds go nuts the bobolinks robins cardinals mockingbirds phoebes
And the many birds whose songs and colors I cannot identify
That one delicious song five chirps and a trill
The soaring buzzards and the soaring raptors
And the languorous crows skilled and cunning
And the bluejays the call of a crow cranked up an octave
Birds that feed on death like all in the kingdom of the animals
And two versions of the barred owl’s cry at night
Six or eight regular notes or the wild arpeggios of the mating frenzy
A phoebe attacked me once when I was hanging laundry on the line
It too thought me eccentric for hanging laundry on a sunny Sunday

The little white cat with black spots
Timid but a little braver now that its larger rival has gone
It still retreats when I make an overture
They say a coyote mauled a chihuahua
Who nevertheless survived the ordeal

You have to drive a car to get into the city
You could take a bus but the schedule is erratic since the lockdown
Or you could drive to the train station
The suburbs assume an automotively equipped populace
And we have driven a car to many great cities Philadelphia Chicago Jacksonville Orlando Charlotte
To visit family and friends in their respective suburbs
I want to be of the people and not of the populace
But demographics are destiny
We do not create ourselves
Except beloved reader in these dear pages