Voiced Stops

Forrest Gander

Summer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through

The kitchen without comment, slams the door. An

Elaborate evening drama, I lug his forlorn weight

From floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap-

Toothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then

Breach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar

Pressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent

Laughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At

Ten, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned

His head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw

The hand untouching, distant from. What fathering-

Fear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration:

An indefinite continuation of life. I whirled out wings. Going

Toward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose.

Blue-pajama-tendered wrists and hands. In rest, his musical

Neck, pillowed cheek. Else by damp relentment, swal-

Lowed almost in coverlet, fetched longwise

From lashing hours into this unlikely angle, wedge,

Elbow of unfollow. Before the nightly footfall

—shtoom—his bed to our bed. Scaled eyes.

(Cézanne died watching the door through which

His son did not arrive). (Ajar, widening. …)

Gone again to non-meridian dreams and

Murmuring broken noise in tens. To wit:

Lying bare, the sheets a husk shed low

Over the sorrel-vine of him. Midnight

Extracts me from sleep to bear witness to that one, there:

Local, small, breathing evenly, pathetic, soothe and bloom.

With nidor of match-torched tick rising from the sink, he

Hams and dishes across a heel-dinged softwood floor.

Improvised jujitsu, mind-mirrored, runny at eyes, nostrils

Gleeting. His sock-feet trail effervescence and gumballs. Or

Shouts into the house: Come out! to see him as

A sthenic wildering daimon zap the driveway

With a curtain rod, the whooping

Center of a ring of spark. His last rite:

Peers into, scrupulously, both closets, under

His bed, luring the dog with milkbones. He worms

Into sheets after her, contorted to fit. Goodnight

Mom etc. I sit at the edge in an intimacy without like

And we talk in soft hues of curved space or frogs

Whose bodies freeze and revive every spring.

From outside, a child’s cry, blank of indecipherable

Sound, pure distress or joy to which the now

Acutely attentive body, body become

Prayer, closes every

Other tuning down.

Planted in my chair within the transparent

Room like an oak, squirrels whirling around.

But the cry does not repeat. And the boy

Should be at school. The haltstitch

Slowly uncomes until my breath begins

To assume its first position. Looming

Close, a cardinal’s liquid cue, cue, a dry

Plash of cars. Barely less green, the face

Of the ongoing in the window again.

Her whimper pitched high, the greyhound dream-

Races on kitchen tile. He scrapes back a chair

And hunches against morning’s cool:

Nates to heels, knees to chin, T-shirt

Stretched over the foreshortened

Bulge of him. Bowl-of-Chex mouthfuls

Mostly open. A newspaper turns: voluptuous

Acoustics of home as bird hits

Window, walls tremble. The concussion

(Crushed breast) blots the pane (broken

Neck) with an impact mark: a solid

Host-white print the breadth

Of a child’s fist from which

The ghost-trace of wingbones upcurve.

No whit poised, but given pause

At the door of his room, I quicken into

Mescalinate ecstasy, softly

Unclocked, stood irrelevant, eldering,

A guardian eloquence

Among the dank smell of him

Fecund in sleep, scratching scabs

On his throat. Loss is what

Distracts. And chiggers underpin

The mutable world whose attributes will

Concur with those of time

While mine at cross-purposes

Careen. So

manage my affections. Killed the light.

Constant singing, the inward rendering pungent

Undersong and wordless high lullaby wafted over a table

Of quadratic equations. Whose whirligig beetles are these

Let loose in the toilet bowl? No shut-up is there,

No sleeping late. The insistence (full gaze) of his face,

High-cheeked, his roweled pupils, peening rum-brown

Eyes, flood-gates to the wonderworld blink wide. Close.

Vertigo of veering to kiss his full lips in the blind

Room. Answerable (the gate swings out) to his summons, this

Opening in being, vast of trouble, inward savor, reprise,

Privilege of. Is gravity. Not situation. Seeing of. What is

Taking place. The yellow Pine Siskin chirping to-thee, to thee

To devote all wakefulness, apprise and spring

As star moss rises and purple melic.