Child
“Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...”― Marguerite Yourcenar
A child set along a current of language adrift the leopard land
see him beneath a river cloud unseemed and apart,
a barron twitch seamless above the mirrored hope in a hoop of netting and his long-limbed frustration
beside an overly-chatty stream hoaxed well,
she understood that, the tackle and the tearing,
all that he would become and what she would allow, forever
the death in the trench a few decades from now nonetheless as his life laid distilling
her holding-on breaking apart as their connection and chemistry rivered on--
through his struggle and disappointment and imagining.
Can you see this, the gravel and leaves and chapped skin warmly touched?
This child that stood above the vein’d river and clawed at the cloud stiffening beneath his trickling feet atilt
gawking at sparrows and glazed-green coke bottles as he, pick after pick after pick, pully’d against the water
bringing to his mouth the cotton white in his paws, the back of his throat apricot pink
the words she fed him crystalline with meaning, the conjugation still tasteless
just damp and fecund and breezy
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 the drum beat of a first syllable planted—
the rest she was giving him up and that was all the mattered
the gravel and leaves and chapped skin warmly touched.
This child spilling out his tiny frame into a new bone star
deconstructing the land between him and her rearrangement fishing the chalking light
still below the coppery leaf smudged by his size 2 boots, she goes wondering
his skin, the pieces of the cumulus peeled together, a stitched sweater over his shoulders
or the recoil from a too-concerned touch and transplanting
skin the sky into shape and what lay just out of his reach
the bone-beat a small click of the first piece of her undoing
his heart tumbling away, the sound she would learn to abide and cadence--
he was three and now she was learning
the fist of loving for the first time, the gravel and leaves and chapped skin warmly touched.
To set him to drift away, the delta long in its clouding and plowing
the muck and thawed stones, the “wait up” echoed in the distant, immature thunder
his tumbling through his struggle and disappointment and imagining, banging
pully’d against the drought of her words as each finger pushes the shape of belief
away and away and away,
the impervious, the boreal, the forlorn light in the back of the heart’s chamber, valving
the chalking light and what lay just out of his reach,
what lay just outside her heart tumbling away
a sound she once learned to abide and cadence
and their chemistry rivered on, lives divesting, the fork in the meal of the road,
this gravel and those leaves and that chapped skin reluctantly touched?
This child
a theatre of lines,
a pavilion of shadows,
a circus of dreams,,algebraic
this child scampering over the line of red hills awkward in the distance and the sea-darkening shapes of this world,
the hum and the music, like a break over a bereft bone,
grew into the shape of this, she knew when she brought him forth from between her legs,
while the horizon receded and recovered in his leave-taking,
the world was relentless and time was dismissive
her heart plucked as she once imagined because there he went,
his stories beckoning his body
through his struggle and disappointment and imagining
gone.
this poem is dedicated to my son Dmia Black, my uncle Chester K Woodward, the poet Chi-wan Choi and my grandmother Elizabeth (Peggy) Woodward
