A Partial Accounting

I can name monkshood and monkeyflower and fireweed
But can’t tell the difference between 
a hurtling satellite and the entrance to heaven.
I’m jealous of smokers, who conduct 
affairs of fire so close to their face. 
Robert Kennedy stumped in my hometown 
three days before his assassination. 
My sister got his autograph, I played ping-pong. 
I’ve never touched an iceberg. I keep string 
and string theory in the same crammed 
kitchen drawer behind my eyes. I am a country 
with weak borders, my quiet dead 
always passing through me, advocates and avatars. 
Bird song is fine, but it’s bossa nova 
I listen to over breakfast. What is a poem 
but a lucky layover in Cleveland or Byzantium? 
I prefer naps that leave sand in my hair, 
or bits of dead grass. I swim but swimming 
doesn’t take the ache away. I still have wisdom 
teeth—in a jar, which I shake like a maraca. 
With an Isla del Sol shaman, I once 
rowed to an energy field in Lake Titicaca. 
Un punto energetico, he said, un punto sagrado. 
Then we threw yarrow and coca leaves 
and prayed to dreaming gods of the dark waves. 
I read tattered diaries like scripture, 
the sky as an owner’s manual, my bank 
statement as a modern-day whodunit.
Sometimes I juggle. I hold funerals 
for robins that crash into glass on my watch.
I used to carry kids on my shoulders.
Now they knock and I buy their weak 
lemonade and pink friendship bracelets. I wish 
I lived on Utopia Parkway like Joseph Cornell.

Lance Larsen is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Making a Kingdom of It (Tampa, 2024). His awards include a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship, and first place poetry honors from Missouri Review, Sewanee Review, and swamp pink. He teaches at BYU and fools around with aphorisms: “A woman needs a man the way a manatee needs a glockenspiel.” In 2017 he completed a five-year appointment as Utah’s poet laureate. Sometimes he juggles.