I was never taught how to blow my nose.
Your nose, my father tells me, is not your own.

I ask him what this means.
He replies, America.

_                                   _~

I watch my wife pluck her eyebrows,
shave her legs.

A woman loving herself
—what I never saw my mother do—

what my father would not allow,
young in his marriage_._

_                                   _~

America: first-class stripper with a space program,
bladed lawns trimmed to the sidewalk.

_                                   _~

My wife knows nothing of stumps
—drilling the hole, pouring the gas.

Waiting. A year or more
for the corrosion, the eating of the roots.

She knows nothing of hooking that stump
with a hoe and pulling it from dead clay.