In the dull ache that is midnight for a boy

his age, I heard the sound of him first:

hiss of the pistol-grip hose from the garden

and the clatter a watery arc makes

coming down silver under streetlights,

on the day-warmed pavement of the road.

And though I muttered at first

to be awakened, I stand now in the window

upstairs, naked and alert, the cool breeze

sweet with the blossoms of locusts.

My wife moans and stirs. She is a slope of white

in the bedclothes, dunes of softness

below the light from the window

and single blind eye of the clock.

‘It’s just Travis,’ I say, hoping

she’ll lapse again into sleep.

I hope she’ll sleep because he is a boy,

fourteen, soft yet himself, unwhiskered.

He believes he is the only one

awake, the only one alive in a world

of cruel nights and unbearable silence.

His parents snore, their house next door is dark.

He crouches on the curb

in just his pajama bottoms, barefoot,

swirling figure eights into the air trafficked

by insects and the fluttering, hunting bats.