Dear Suburb

Author(s): DAVID RODERICK

Source: Poetry, Vol. 195, No. 3 (DECEMBER 2009), pp. 209-210
Published by: Poetry Foundation
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25706784
Accessed: 27-02-2019 11:27 UTC

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 DAVID RODERICK

Dear Suburb

I'm not interested in sadness,

just a yard as elder earth,
a library of sunflowers
battered by the night's rain.
When sliced wide, halved at dawn,
I can see how you exist,
0 satellite town, your bright possibility
born again in drywall
and the diary with the trick lock.
Hardly held, for years I slept
with my window wide open,
wanting screen-cut threads of rain.
Blind suburb, dear untruth,
you who already know what I mean
when I praise every spared copse,
you were my battery, my sad clue,
but after I mowed the lawn
and watched robins chesting
for seeds I couldn't resist
what hung in the toolshed,
where, with a pair of garden shears
1 cut all the hair from my arms. That need,
that scared need to whiten
or clean a surface: plywood or lawn,
and the spywall behind which I stood,
stock-still, and sinned against
the fly's flyness. Though you live
inside me, though you laid eggs
in the moisture at the corners
of my eyes, I still dream about
your sinking empire twenty feet above
sea level, and the many things
you never see: beautiful bleached
gas can, tomato posts bent into art,

DAVID RODERICK 200

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 how half of a butterfly, cut crosswise,
still looks like a butterfly, etc.

2IO POETRY

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