What Thou Lovest Well Remains American

Election season, and I’m watching this video of a presidential candidate waving to crowds of people that don’t exist. It’s a lot like a TV show where men with spiked hair and names like Brad

Hunter chase spirits down the halls of an abandoned hospital. It’s nice to believe, and 
perhaps there are charts that graph the benefits of doing so, that what we do matters,

that face in the rock actually was your grandmother, or a bird right now is singing 
your name, delivering a warning exclusively to you that says: “Don’t go SCUBA diving.”

One Autumn my brother and I decided to sneak a pumpkin over our neighbor’s head
while she stooped in her garden because we believed it would be the funniest thing

to ever happen. But there are limits to belief. The person who brings you drinks 
is not in love with you, though for four minutes and thirty-two seconds you rehearse

the poem you’ll read at your wedding, and how many doves you’ll release and 
in which direction. Sure, maybe there’s a world where the dead, hungry, rise

within the town limits, and someone you love needs saving. Maybe, if we believe it,
The Macarena never happened, was just an unfortunate thing the singer dreamed

but by the time morning came was smoke from a distant blaze, 
another departed soul rising between bush and telephone wire. Presidents

should be laughed at as much as any other profession, but also waved to
by nothing. It builds the spirit, and injects the arteries with what I won’t call

empathy, since we can’t say to them: Here’s your helmet, now get to war. Though that 
might solve a problem or two on the Shit List, so different from my neighbor’s

shit list my brother and I joined that Autumn, in her garden, after the deed was done.
Remembering it now I’m regretful for the fear we caused, and confusion, but also proud

as there was this moment when a sudden darkness fell over the world 
for which she knew no reason, when she stood and waved her hands

at no one, reaching into the empty air in front of her as though to pet a spooked horse 
or wrangle a loose piñata, or like a dying emperor feel for walls of an invisible palace,

how suddenly she was a king burning with a vision for our future that was an open door, a beautiful country, if we too could see it: we could be great if we really believed.