vexillum

I was almost seven the summer the whole country
went red, white, and blue at once—
the fire hydrant on the corner dressed up like a minuteman,
the milk cartons, the Dixie cups, the bottom of the public pool,
even the quarter in my pocket
grew a little drummer boy overnight
and I figured that was just what quarters did.
I figured the country had always been this,
would always be this: a thing so plainly good
you put it on everything, the way you sign your name.
I didn’t know yet that loving it
was a position you could take.
I just loved it the way you love the smell of chlorine,
the way you love a song before you’ve learned the words—
the tall ships came up the river on the television
and my grandfather cried and I didn’t ask him why.
Of course you’d cry. That was the whole point.
That was the dare.
Fifty years later…
Now there’s a flag on a porch two doors down
and I can’t see it as a flag anymore.
It’s a sentence. It’s team merch now. It’s a man’s entire
opinion stapled to a stick—
and the ones who’d never fly one
cut their eyes away as they pass, like it might go off.
Somewhere a committee is scheduling the fireworks
for this two hundred and fiftieth birthday,
and it lands less like a celebration than like a hand
laid on the back of the neck. Celebrate.
You will celebrate.
And I want to say—to who? the porch? the flinchers?—
it was ours. all of it. the whole stupid gorgeous experiment,
the song you can’t get through without your voice
cracking on the high part—
and we let the two halves of the country
each wander off with a piece of it,
each of us holding our jagged edge up to the light,
swearing the other side made off with the better half.
The English do this. The French do this.
Canada, God love them, does it politely.
Different costumes, same wound:
turns out the whole free world is just
people who can’t agree on what they share,
standing in the house they built together,
arguing over who gets to stay.
But I keep landing on the kid
up on his father’s shoulders the night they lit the sky,
the sparkler gone cold in his fist,
the whole street out on its lawns for once at the same hour,
nobody asking anybody what they believed—
the dark coming down between the bursts,
and for a second every upturned face
just a face.
He’s still up there, that kid.
Dead certain the country meant it.
And I have never once had the heart
to climb up and tell him
what we did with it.