They do not move. They cannot bend their knees.
When we go to bed, the Redcoats do not sit down
to a cold Sunday joint and an eighteenth-century
discussion of natural moralities.
Nor can they constitute corporations, or sail
away from us all in a catamaran
beyond the range of the ceiling fan. Their band
has never disassembled its microphone stand
in order to build a tower for 2 Hz
radio signals whose primes summon alien beings.
Their girls cannot link hands;
their smooth-faced construction workers in orange jumpsuits
with decals for zippers, their knights of suzerain lands
in smoothly painted-on armor, cannot insist
on byrnies or jazerants that nobody sees.
They do not move. They cannot bend their knees.
Their niece, with her persimmon bowl cut, never flees
her own maple-strewn backyard; she will never steal
the breeches from a stranger’s line, nor find
camaraderie and peril upon the high seas.
Nor does the glossy-eyed butterfly princess pose,
still sullen, before her regent; she will never hold
her crown shakily in round fingers—more bronze than gold,
more circlet or torc than crown—nor attempt to postpone
her marriage to her scrofulous second cousin
despite their mothers’ frenetic diplomacies;
her bearded, big-eyed uncle never removes
his wig, and never disagrees.
All of them know how to read. None fears the tale
of the monkey’s paw, how by wishing to make
your family perfect you kill it; none of them have
to cease, or pause, their play while another one pees.
None of them know how low
the imagination recedes,
how you end up doing only what other
people remind you to do,
thus fashioning the new life to which
a responsible person cedes
in some sort of ecstatic resignation
in the same way that kids learn when to say please.
Given their hollow heads, their sturdy
cylindrical necks, they could almost know how to breathe,
though none of them breathes. They cannot bend their knees.