Recycling

There is a joke I tell
      (with varied reactions)
when asked about home.

I’ll now reshape it as
	a poem. The highest peak
in South Florida is a landfill

they’ve repurposed as a park. And
	I’m not sure what they fed the land
to make it smell of itself again—

like goosegrass and dollarweed
	hacked with a mower
damp beneath our blanket—

but it worked. And you wouldn’t know
	our present picnic sits atop
the bones and bones of thousands

of past (even prehistoric) picnics
	in which maple-eyed children picked
at their sandwiches and left lettuce

trapped in matchweed for the rats
	who later found themselves
caught in hairy tufts around the mouth

of a neighborhood cat—which, later, 
	while no one looked on, left itself 
for the vultures, their circling whirlwind

the winding and winding of life
	toward death or death
toward life. Perhaps, on this blanket,

we haven’t yet decided. 

And
        I think
	        how playfully we practice death,
making life from it like clay—how yesterday 
or before 
    we made love between two broken down
lives and 
	   after
      wine and confidence summering 
      in shared breaths, you said: yes
I’d like to live forever		
      and we 
            each plopped grapes into our gumball mouths
and decided to let this earth reuse us
	as many times as it wishes.