After Watching Ice Age Three

Stephen Burt

To live as others do should have been easier,

as easy as falling off the overhang

of a slippery cliff, with help from a log.

My tusks had been holding you up. I am sorry for it.

The most dangerous place in the world

is the world, or becomes the world

after you have to flee into it. Even the cap

of an acorn, or the wind-distributed promise

of a future accord, will do, since all families are

adoptive, or they are failed families, or they are both,

as wind chimes need the wind

to tell what they falsely believe to be “their own story”;

the echoes in that cavern must also do justice

to the last chipmunks on earth. They fell in love,

delighting the birthday party, who saw it all

last year (age median: eight and a half). We hold

their hypothetical findings at a distance

until we realize we are in there too,

in the freezing not-quite-

forever of an artificial-

butter-and-paste-scented theater, where everything rings

and nothing gets picked up, and you have to hunt

your own critters if you want critters, to get out

and then sneak back in with some help from that freaky invention

your sister called “fire.” And that’s why we never came home.