Bedtime Drawing

The trees tonight are a fiction.
You could believe
a child's hand drew them
and colored the moon
just rising.
The hills are the hills of my fathers.
All are in decline.

Twenty-nine is the age when decline
sets in and fiction
runs away with itself in clothes and I swear fathers
are as natural to believe
as a new moon
rising.

Cows over the moon,
the sad decline
of Jack and Jill's glad rising:
such fiction
I repeat to my son and I believe
(as do other fathers)

that fathers
don't grow on trees, that beneath the moon
no son must believe
to live or decline
to die; that the truth of fiction
depends on a ritual rising

and depends on need: the voice of the manchild rising,
the father's
reaching. I seek after a solid fiction.
The moon
my son drew won't decline.
Can I believe

and believe as the sun is rising
there is no decline
so final it erases fathers
like the sun the moon
or reduces sons to rhymes and collected fiction?