Andrew David King

THEORY OF REGENERATION

One bruise and another make America
as fast as you would think, only you can add
them forever and the industrial warehouses 
with their coffin-sized skylights never fill. 
I was someone once who could pull a lever 
and make the whole thing lean slightly to one 
side. It wouldn’t change its course, anything’s,
yours, mine, my seeing that sign in my own 
window that said LOVE, coming home late 
from a shift of pleading with children 
to take language as seriously as a gun locker.
I was told that a woman who used to live 
in the ancient house past my rental trapped birds 
for her cats with a blanket. Last flights 
among the dank mirrors, dulled from decades 
of showing air to air. In a photo of the place 
when she owned it, in her private century 
inside ours, ivy rips like fire over its face. It’s true 
it was alive, that to cut it would make it
suffer, that its suffering could change 
nothing about this Rube Goldberg machine 
of angst and liquid assets that has given 
unto us two darknesses. Together they make 
a darkness. The leaves I didn’t rake became 
the ground. And so the dove carcass I buried, 
ten years old, thinking I’d dig it up for science.
How easy it went down into a sky I still haven’t 
learned to look for. How easy a strange physics 
lifts me from this city day after selfsame day.