My poem “Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces” appears in the 30th-anniversary issue of the Asheville Poetry Review, an issue brimming with poems published by the magazine over that time, including Eavan Boland, Lorine Niedecker, Patricia Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, Michael Harper, A. R. Ammons, R. S. Thomas, Gerald Stern, William Matthews, Yvgeny Yevtushekno, Joy Harjo, Jack Spicer, Cornelius Eady, Quincy Troupe, Robert Bly, Rachel Hadas, Ai, A. E. Stallings, Lucille Clifton, Frank Stanford, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Donald Revell, Claudia Emerson, Sherman Alexie, Hayden Caruth, Billy Collins, and many others, including a new poem of mine to close out the issue. Learn more about the magazine here.

In recent years, many have sighed or rolled their eyes at my poems of fatherhood and childhood. This is understandable, but the truth is that such poems make up only a very small part of what I’ve published in magazines and books over the past decade. Nevertheless, there are more to come, and this is one of them. The King James line used as the title refers to the desolation not of cities but of one’s own life and home as a child grows out of childhood and leaves it behind. Repurposed as it is, wrenched out of its place, it seems a charming image of dragons residing in their own fantastic places out of our reach. The book referred to at the end is the classic and truly delightful Go, Dog, Go by P. D. Eastman.

Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces

Dragons enchant my son: Marbled armor
And plumes of flame, their cloudy homes up high, 
Always at a misty distance from where 

We stand hoping we might see them soar. 
He wants to know: Do they “resist” today? 
He means exist. They always will if you 

Imagine them. Dissatisfied by this,
He wants to know if they’re “in the Jurassic,”
A place on the globe we could visit

(Like Conan-Doyle’s pterodactyl-flocked
Plateau unchanged outside of time). 
Do dragons die? It’s hard to say, I say. 

But I wind up crying every goddamned time
I read him Puff the Magic Dragon. 
He knows I will and asks me anyway. 

He’s captivated by my harmless sorrow.
I read the story and hear the corny song, 
My voice brittle as old glassine, stifling a sob.

Our hearts are dangerous rainbows, dispelled
In the common light of all our minor hours. 
He wants to know what’s behind it all.

Why do I cry? Why does it happen every time?
Because little boys don’t last forever.
My melancholy leaves him unimpressed. 

He’s bored by what he doesn’t understand. 
He excavates another book from plush 
Barrows of polar bears, narwhales, and tigers,

One with dogs that talk and drive fast cars. They race 
Across the plains toward a magic tree,
Its stately canopy rising over the horizon

Ever higher as they speed with manic joy
To join their friends, cavorting on branches, 
Lightheaded with happiness just to be alive.