Scared of maps, I draw a bath

and think of a very weird thing, a future

child I’ll change and draw baths for

and feed and, surely eventually, disappoint.

God they’ll say, looking at me

you don’t understand anything.

There’ll be good stuff, too, but going

episodic on it now feels silly

Today I walked through an aisle of car seats

and thought, I’m not ready.

I stop the water. William Bronk never had

biological kids, but he was like a father

to countless poets who came to his

place in Hudson Falls, where he would cook

beautiful and complex meals and where

he took care of his mother and where

he died in his living room having written

a small poem about art.

It doesn’t mean I’ll never be

ready, I’m just not ready now. But I have time.

There’s a rhyme between I shall go

and prepare a place for you and

I will learn how best to take care of you

given human knowledge, its sorry

state, my forgetfulness, my forgetfulness

in red, my forgetfulness in green

which two things I cannot tell apart

like the dewfall, its individual beads

on one blade of god’s grass.