A Good Constitution
O my one son,
your toys are doing their work: your backhoe
is loading heartbreak onto your dumptruck
and carrying it into your room to the place where
a tower, impossibly unbalanced, holds
together with my tears. If anything
should happen to you, whole species of animals
would stiffen at once, the cookie-cutter shapes of the world
harden to cemetery sculpture--even the last
collapsed flat level of the endless end itself
torment me with hints of your secretive smile. My past,
that best once-upon-a-time of puzzles,
means less to me than yours: let what I have been
become the past of your past, a purposely vague
body of constitutional precedents
for you to draw upon and justify
whatever you must become, beyond all my.
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