Gardener of Teeth

Even now, when there’s nothing left but a name,
I think of walking with Jeannie in Ithaca, city of gorges.
She’s lagging two steps behind, and in her mind she’s blaming me
for walking too fast, when I’m walking at the same pace as always.
We take the hill while Ithaca, that sly city, shrinks back behind the hedges.
The streets unwind into a lone sidewalk splattered with gingko.
We call it Memory Lane when everything else has been forgotten.
Houses whose numbers are obscured by trees
with Fall leaves, but Spring flowers, as far as I can remember,
and children who’ve become the people I never met,
people whose last names have dropped out of the story—
great good-for-nothing Memory,miserly deceiver,
hoards its grist for the dream mill.
Jeannie flies away and lands in the USA.
(She never lands in LA.) Jeannie lands in DC
only to find the capital overrun by Mongols.
Catching the last passenger plane out of Newark,
Jeannie appreciates the opportunity, once again, to view the peaks
of mountains she’s never climbed, rivers she’s never crossed,
even the cracked ice of the Great North on which she’s never set foot.
She has her nose pressed against the plane’s plexiglass window
when it rounds the harbor into a full view of Hong Kong
crouching on the bay, a polluted Hawaii from the future.
As she stares, the city detaches itself from memory
like a hot air balloon rising over green valleys.
She was ill prepared for defeat in the Aloha State.
At the Battle of Waikiki, against enemy hordes
outside the gates chanting, “Gennie, Gennie,
who’s got the Gennie?” Jeannie lifts her sword high,
vowing to defend the one thing that grows for her alone,
a golem of pure imagination, her permanent doll, some kind of
Secret Garden.