What Joy There Was

Young or old, skin serves:
borders keep innards in place.
Young or old, we believe wings
encompass universal detritus:
car keys, single socks, diamonds,
Erno's cracked limbs,
his woman's fat hips,
the dogwood's budding branches.
We believe all is counted.
Yet Erno's gang is not much involved—
it goes on with or without them.
The waters ripple and flow with fish
and even if reproduction slows in Europe,
it does not halt. Therefore
the gang chooses hard
to remember what joy there was
in Miami, the Christmas of '68,
they watched, with their little boy,
the plastic pine tree change
from bright red to white to cobalt blue
then, at once, to all the glory colors.