Manhattan’s full moon between skyscrapers
Forbade it.
The new moon, her whole family of phases,
Running the gleam of the rails
From rising to falling forbade it.
Even the beaver, way up in Alaska,
Treading water, to watch your son
Doing something strange in a glide of the Deshka,
Forbade it.
Yosemite’s oldest root on earth, needle
By needle was adamant,
Onto your daughter’s page, with signatures.
Every prairie-dog in Wyoming
Whether or not it ate the grapes you tossed
Forbade it.
Bubbles from Yellowstone’s boiling paint-pots
Forbade it. They dubbed their prohibition
Sound-track onto your snapshot portrait fixtures.
Even the sluggish fish in Pontchartrain
Lobbed out right beside you where you swam
To forbid it. Night after night.
Nauset groaned in its sleep
And mumbled and mouthed, to forbid it –
Miles of shuddering lifted and fell back
A thunderclap veto.
And from a distant land your grandma’s
Wedding photo hurried to forbid it.
Just as your own words
Irrevocably given to your brother,
And my own airier words, conscripted, reporting for duty,
Forbade it and forbade it.
They were simple guards and all were yawning,
Ignorant how your left hand wrote in a mirror
Opposite your right,
Half of you mortified, half of you smiling.
And ignorant of the spooky chemistry
Of opportunity, of boom and bust
In the optic nerve of editors.
Ignorant of the tumblers in the lock
Of US Copyright Law
Which your dead fingers so deftly unpicked.