By David Harris Ebenbach

My son enters the poem
forcefully. He is four years
old and has no time for
the landscape I've been
building with the patience
of a bonsai grower: no time
for the row homes, each
one with a different color
paint on the porch roof,
no time for the predictable
split in the sidewalk slate,
no interest in the long road
from that place to this,
one preaching billboard after
another. He shoves aside
the familiar nouns and
replaces remember, search,
and long with verbs of his
own: show, give, have. In
his hands is a clutch of
erasers, which for now he
will keep in a drawer in
the living room. And now
there's an end table in the
poem, a drawer that closes
and opens.