In nineteen ninety-four we tried to clear
the yard behind the back—a squalling fringe
of ferns, bamboo, and flora seemingly Burmese.
Our mom had sought to coax the rampant land
and sharp escarpments toward arcadia,
where she could plant azaleas, zinnias,
gazebos, tennis courts. “How ‘bout a house?”
asked Dad. “Hotels? A good casino too.”
But when he left on business for Beijing
I knew the purge would fail. Like building fire,
the work seemed strange without my father’s hands
to oversee. As Bobcats feebly hoed
the earth, the enemy amorphously
disguised, neighbors began to picket for
an end, not knowing how unconventional
a war this was. Her hope in symmetry
and art interred, mom asked for two more months.
When dad came back from the Far East, he brought
Her Hermes scarves, and me a Tonka truck.
“Experiments in real estate are gaps
in credibility,” he said to me,
watching the slow recession of our land
from safe above, through a hallway porthole.
No other yard on Richfield Avenue
had ever looked so thick with Vietcong.
After two months, our losses cut, we fenced
in what we could—a sundial, the magnolia,
domestic life, the better books, some Tupperware,
a cherub here, a trellis there. But could
a fence keep out the throngs? How long?
And how long could it keep us in? Eventually,
not long ago, we burned the lot until
it looked, as dad observed, like Petersburg,
eighteen fourteen. “They burned the land so that
they could retreat,” he said, the smell of smoke
thick on the wind, the acre’s embers near their end.