My goal was to wake with nothing
in my head—it’s nice to begin a day
having already achieved. Sunlight
on the dead grass of the ski slope.
A lone runner works his way up
the fire road, a dull throb in my ankle
where it twisted on the edge of getting
younger, of celebrating my luck
in still being able to run. Ralph, my friend,
has been trying to convince me for years
that the life of an adult is boring
but I’ve never aspired to the life
of an adult. My wife holds up a diaper,
“A pound of pee.” There’s joy in that.
In another city, strangers excavate
our old lives to make room for our
new ones. Why we don’t say we’re lucky
and leave it at that, I don’t know. “You know,”
I say, “there’s enough water in Lake Tahoe
to fill a canal fifty feet wide and two hundred
feet deep from San Francisco to Los Angeles.”
A full sentence that startles me but I’m
still not ready to say something big,
something about grace and the rhythms
of a body moving from half state to awake
and someone on the stereo is already
asking if this life would be easier
if I had someone else to blame. Outside,
a shriek and giggle—the girls
we listened to last night
smoke their first cigarette, cough
in the high of transgression, run
through the grass to cheer
camp. My ankle throb synchs
with the sprinklers. I do a Jesus
stretch and my daughter clears
her sore throat like a prop plane.

Noah Blaustein has had published poems in ZYZZYVA, the Massachusetts Review, the Harvard Review, Barrow Street, Poetry Daily, The Fish Anthology (selected by Billy Collins), Orion, Pleiades, and many other journals. Noah’s first book, Flirt, was selected by Kevin Prufer for University of New Mexico’s Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series edited by Hilda Ras. The anthology he edited, Motion: American Sports Poems, was an editor’s pick of National Public Radio and The Boston Globe as well as a Librarian’s Pick of the New York Public Library.