You Can Only Be One Place at a Time

James Ducat

to my son

I want you to know
that expectations
are resentment in waiting,
but at age 7, you draw

the entire road and river system
to a 30-mile radius of our house,
color coordinated (roads red,
water blue). I want

to explain how the sun lifts
color from the carpet
and paint and cars, but at 10
years old you ask, What if this

is all a simulation. Well,
our eyes turn everything
upside down, so if you think
about it, we simulate our world,

and who is to say there isn’t
a way to resonate atoms, pass
through a wall, be set free.
The line between will

and delusion is a Lego set,
is a rocket ship, is a moon
landing. But the loneliness, you say. If I die, I will be alone
and bored. You will not be there.

I cannot answer.
No one knows the answer, I try.
Somebody somewhere may have guessed. Yes,
I say, but how would we ever know.

You keep pressing, and my head
starts to hurt. You spill
a glass of water and I
want to be angry, angry

enough that you learn how
a tree bends away
from its past, to ignore
how I occasionally exhale

through my teeth at bad
service, that rock is fluid,
that because stars cannot climb,
the earth turns. You are a copy

with the parts jumbled. Collage
your mother’s determination
and the theme music to Star Trek Voyager.
Swim lessons and road

trips. Animals and space. Geology
and Bob’s Burgers. And you know
the measure for celestial bodies in orbit,
what speed it takes to escape gravity,

so time and space invert
between us, shrivel as I borrow
the day, and by the time I start,
your eyes have closed.

James Ducat’s poetry has appeared in Carve, Bellingham Review, CutBank, Apogee, Spoon River Poetry Review, has been featured on Verse Daily, and is anthologized by The Inflectionist Review, Orangelandia, and others. His chapbook A Field of Nopes is from Bamboo Dart Press. James holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and is associate professor of English and creative writing at Riverside City College, where he advises the literary journal MUSE.