No Place of Sorrow

I’m told of a man who carries a sack of turnips dusted with dirt
across the country to a woman he doesn’t yet know.

I watched a boy nail a string of purple neon lights to the cross
on his venerable grandfather’s grave.

These offerings don’t come from a place of sorrow.

A woman wore dark glasses to cover her eyes,
said she needed a miracle,

so she left in the twilight for Tulsa
to tithe to the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association—

an act of desperation, maybe, or innocence—but not yet
despair.

I traffic in hope, for I am hopeless.
I trend with the guileless, for I am with guile.

I, without offering,
peek from the bush at the singular bowerbird

rapt in his exotic dream.
He lays his carpet of blue bottle caps, blue marbles, and bluets,

his bubblegum-pink pompom crest
a garish corsage of joy.

I watch his spastic but earnest dance—

you who are silly,
you without sorrow,
I choose.