Another Kind of Fireworks

You can't take anyone anywhere they aren't ready to go.

Twenty-five years ago, I fell in love with someone with a Fourth of July birthday. Although I think he loved me too, the relationship was not to be. I did, however, write a poem about it. It still feels true to me today.

FOURTH OF JULY

Last night my brother and I
sat on the railroad tracks
while fireworks bloomed overhead
like fabulous tropical flowers.

Tired of running towards the bay
to see the lights
and their reflections all at once,
we plopped, cross-legged,
to the packed earth,
while others hurried past us,
desperate for a better place.

"These fireworks are the best,"
my brother said,
and I remembered myself,
nine years old at Jayhawk Stadium
with my fifty-eight-year-old father,
both of us badgering
his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend:
"Aren't these the best
you've ever seen? Aren't they?"
until she turned to us,
weary, patient:
"Why, exactly, do they have to be
the best?"

But these were the best,
my brother and I decided.
Fireworks have come a long way.
Raucously, we called out names
to their exploding brilliance,
"Fountain! Halo! Anemone! Sperm!"
and held each other's hands
and laughed.

Meanwhile,
on a still lake,
you sat in a kayak
as the sun set,
observing your birthday alone.
While we crowed at displays
of human giddiness,
you cried on your meditation cushion,
mourning the mess
you've made of your life.

If only I could have taken you
to such luminous places,
my impossibly naïve self whispered,
you'd be beside me now,
laughing instead of crying,
loving instead of mourning,
looking to the future instead of the past.
If only I could have shown you
this glorious, meaningless light.

If only I were a better magician.

But of course that isn't the story.
Fireworks, to you, are more problem
than solution, and besides,
you can't take anyone anywhere
they’re not ready to go.
The past won't cave so simply
to a radiant present,
nor should it, you would say,
not for grown-ups,
not when it carries
such guilty, aching weight.

The kayak, the cabin, the meditation cushion
have no place in this glowing field
where I sit with my brother.
They are your story;
this is mine:
Thirty-two years on the weed-choked earth,
loving and beloved,
empty and full,
wishing only
that all of life could be just this,
so violently lovely,
so startlingly innocent,
too bright for wistful reflection,
too urgent for troubled thought.

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