MANTLE

Good morning, American mothers and fathers—and gain way! For here,

with a sweet contradictory swiftness,

comes the height width and weight of my entire 

ungainly generation. Waking and stretching 

the skinny tapered length of our souls before dressing

in our superhero cowls and then marching quickly cross-country—

toward Cape Canaveral and Orlando, toward

Palo Alto and Cupertino, toward

Los Alamos and University of Chicago and so-on—for our

catholic calisthenics and continuing Adult-Kindergarten classes each morning;

with bright McIntoch, with Red Delicious, and with Jonathan apples 

in-hand for each of our dried plum- and potato-skinned teachers,

and with even brighter bulges of those red ripe circles 

asleep in our cheeks—one for safe-keeping and the other 

for lunch—and then rolling up our capes and shirtsleeves before resuming

the great plot of our scholarly mission. Namely: to dream!

To reinvent! To justify! To forget! And then, to a certain 

inevitable extent, re-remember! That—we alone 

comprise the world's only current, complete, living, and bounded set 

of sweet-faced and innocent and swell-tempered beginners!

And then, after class, we always come boomeranging back home again;

understanding less than before, clamoring for snacks, and burning 

to ask lots of questions—although we only ever hear ourselves
give the answers. Heck, we're not even sure we exist yet! Which just makes it 

all the more instructive—that we are the God you'll be praying to someday.