When you’re thirteen, an old man’s face has a Wild West look,
the site of unimaginable extinctions and ancient

trackless massacres, dried-out arroyos and gulches carved

into the moon-white silica. You grow accustomed, however,
to the pity and the waste of it, to the fact this

catastrophe is so obviously not me. So before it was too late,
one Sunday I helped him put together a Nazi

Stuka dive bomber, just like one he said he saw flying futile
late-war missions over Luxembourg or Belgium

or somewhere else. Not a good plane, he told me, we swatted

‘em like flies. The news that he was dying had finally come
to bore me a little, in that heartless, guilty way

of the well-meaning young. So that’s what I did in order to be
a good boy: an old man’s afternoon dutifully

obliterated. We made a mess, what with my impatience
and his Parkinson’s, splayed-out landing gear and a gummed-

over canopy. The tiny pilot and his pitiless machine-gunner

we managed to blob for eternity into the cockpit
while I affixed the decals: tiny black crosses for the wings and

wadded-up snarls of tiny, meaningless swastikas for the rudder.

Just released by the robin I spooked, a dying earthworm gives a feeble wave
crooked heartbreakingly like a miniature somebody’s tiny

pink naked broken arm from the middle of Berry Street. The sun cooks us
both out of our broth while everything else yammers

and flits, sprouts and photosynthesizes, territorializes, incubates and ruts –

such rabid dogmatists! Sparrows go on like sophomore business majors
brown as briefcases, inflating resumes and exaggerating

their credentials over lunch. Amplexus and ejaculations! Crazy fifing and

thrums down at Frog Pond. Even this year’s first swirling cloud of gnats
looks purposeful, a fist-sized bolus of resolute will and

untoward success. I stride through them with a stiff-kneed late-Jurassic gait
and crave to snap them up with the crumbling yellow ivory

of my fossilized jaws. I glance at my wristwatch. Squirrels scuttle outraged
along the trunk of a dogwood in sexually melodramatic

chattering lunges. It’s the triumph of the bushy-tailed! The decline and fall

of the saurians! Today it’s just me and the blistered, the caught and the half-
eaten. Today it’s just me and the worm, baby.