Then This
Home at last
like they say and right away
the phone call’s for me.
The human ear is most sensitive
to the pitch of weeping. Our son practices
his cello in the living room. You
stand at the counter chaffing bay leaf into a bowl.
Mums I placed last week in a vase
wilt by the window. My friend, the stranger
on the phone tells me, suddenly
died, who despite every determination
to go on living was waylaid by the sheer
organic ineptitude of the body.
On the refrigerator behind me, a photograph
of our son as a baby
balanced on the same friend’s outsized palm,
their eyes locked in mutual thrall.
Beneath my solar plexus, something like
past and present circle the last chair.
The music stops.
The Conversation
All the while he talks to
the boy, their son, on the phone,
she is interrupting, telling him something
to say, not to say, indicating
that she needs to talk to the boy
herself. Rather than dampening
her enthusiasm or trying
to listen to both at once, finally
he hands her the phone. And
rather than resentment, he feels
inside himself some primordial
tenderness upwelling.
June, Tendrils of Trumpet Vine
The boy picks up his cello, tunes it,
leans it back into the corner.
Sunburned and disconsolado,
he stands in the bathroom
practicing his glare. Who
put a spider in your dumpling,
you ask him. An hour later, he’s
chuntering through his music.
When night comes on, the frogs
take it up a notch and
as the last shreds of
noctilucent cloud fade
and it gets too dark
even to see each other,
you ask, Where
is your face, Forrest?
Inside me,
it doesn’t age.
Frame Structure With Post and Lattice 2
His eyes too swollen for his eyelids to
pocket them. Allergies, he explains, I’m
not high. The only thing he won’t eat
is boiled okra or anything green.
Gone the marriage, his mother gone.
We talk to take the edge off.
Shirts and pants draped over
the neighbor’s t-pole. A prankster kid, the
neighbor tells me, made off with the clothesline.
Our eyes lock and she sees me hope
vaguely that it wasn’t mine, my
kid. Beware of dog her sign says, but
nothing about the larva of melancholy.
Breath
A broken air conditioner blows warm
germs over the bed. Barn swallows
strafe the surface of the fish pond until dusk
when fruit bats drive them off. At the pond’s edge,
a dragonfly oviposits on a reed,
sipping air bubbles
that cling to its legs. In the summer
of his earphones and high rubato
laugh, I find our son squatting motionless
beside the barn, staring at
a mole’s corpse
shaken end to end by maggots
beneath it, the valves of their mouths
snapping open and shut. What
am I thinking? The war is far off
and no one can count
the number of their dead
children. What will it take
to not lose track,
to hold onto what
matters through months of nothing
nobler than routine, through
each disappointment,
through every diminution?
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