CHILD
He stood above the vein’d river and clawed at the cloud stiffening beneath his trickling feet
Atilt
And gawking as he, pick after pick after pick, pully’d against the water
To bring to his mouth the cotton white that was crystalline and tasteless.
Just damp and fecund and breezy,
As each finger-prick point pushed the shape away and away and away,
As a mid-sentence comma periscopes its button of pause and shrinking
leaving behind, though afore, the drum beat of a first syllable planted.
Spilling and deconstructing and fishing, the chalking light.
She, below the coppery leaf smudged by his size 2 boots,
Wondered:
To skin the pieces of the cumulus together like a stitched sweater for him
Or recoil from a too-concerned touch and transplanting
to skin to sky to shape what lay just out of his reach.
But in that beat, a small click of the first piece of her heart tumbling away from her
The sound she would learn to abide and cadence.
He was but 3 and now she was learning the true fist of loving.
To set him adrift and away, like that river cloud coming apart seamless
mirrored in his hope of netting and frustration.
By the overly-chatty river, she understood that.
All that he would become, what she must forever allow,
lay distilling and breaking apart as their connection and chemistry rivered on.
And this music, like a break over a bereft bone, grew while the horizon receded.
