Ligature

When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence pulls through them, the family rises into thinness and begins to break like a wave.

You turned away when I kissed you, the woman says.  Why?

Into his notebook, the man corrals marks which come clear, if at all, in an interval.  So the poem speaks only to those who read it, he writes. 

Half-lidded days of early winter.

When he points toward the woman, the boy looks at his hand the way dogs will.

The boy’s jaw sets.  As though behind his teeth, into the soft flesh of his throat, a new set of teeth were cutting through.  A mouth for what?

Each of them adopts a private view.  Arguments careen every which way, and who can follow?  A sequence of dark non-sequiturs blows in.

When one, when one word, when the word suicide enters the room where they are shouting, the system closes down, prematurely becalmed.

The man writes, I am not given a subject but am given to my subject.  I am inside it like a parasite.

He sees the woman’s face contract at the approach of other futures than the one for which her face was prepared.

She does not recall his fingertips dimpling the small of her back or the foyer of an empty church in Todos Santos.  She is stuck in the dim present like a bird with one eye open.

So they inhabit their resounding bodies for a given time like music.  And yet he continues to act as if there were another time. 

I just want you to go away, one of them screams.  But nothing and no one goes away.

Imagine climbing from this fox hole onto pavement. Sticking out a thumb.  Who has not longed to be that deserter?

Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the afternoon moon over their house.

She calls the man to a corner in the basement.  Those aren’t spider eggs, he says, backing up.  Those are its eyes.

When the encounter with the self is volcanic, nothing can follow.

Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy within the family.

As if they were waiting.  As if inside experience, there were another experience unnamed, pendant, bright with meaning.

Ligature 2

I’m afraid you have mistaken my intent, I do not say to her.  And so we will not speak to each other again.

Small dog barking “like it wants something.”  But the birds are not singing like they want something.

Early moon, an illuminated fetus. 

That deep, intimate smell of a child in sickness, I mean to say: the fusion of fever, skin, hair, and sweat at the neck.  But my translation is so slow, my auditors take child and smell and begin to - interject: the smell of Calomine when he had chicken pocks, the smell of the baby’s breath after nursing ….

Requisite tequila shots.  The face looking back haggard, lined.

The human ear appears most sensitive to the sound of keening.  So that birds seem to vocalize the grief of trees?

A dog on the rooftop, her teats black and long, checks out the boy who walks ahead of us and on the opposite side of the street.

Her come-hither finger curl auditions his response.

As we pass the beggar slouched against the wall with his palm open on his knee, is it still sky of skies or skies of sky?

To watch, in the woman’s eyes, the sinking Plimsoll line of her despair.

At the hotel, sunburned and disconsolado, the boy immelmanning across the pool for an hour.

I remember dreaming last night that he loved me.

Ligature 3

One hairy woodpecker follows another around the trunk.

Word as sap, I scrawled.  As soon as possible.

Waiting for the boy, a gangly pup lolls at the edge of the plaza.  Rolls onto its back, attacks a scrap of napkin.

From our table, I watch the woman’s eyes shuffle the faces of passersby.  Her earrings have stretched the holes in her lobes into suggestive slits.

When we first met, the words we whispered were erotic.  Later it was the silence.

A stranger asks me to accompany her son to the men’s room.  He has an eagerness to pees, she translates.

Humility is pride’s strictest flourish, its grass script.  But to submit to the world is integration, the beginning of—

The boy picks a leaf to lay beside the rhinoceros beetle flailing on its back.  The beetle rights itself against the leaf.  Meanwhile the twig begins to bleed.

All the while we sit jostled against each other on the crowded bus, angry and unspeaking, an electrostatic charge joins the fine hairs of our legs. 

When he doesn’t come home, I search for him.  Under the streetlamp, a dust-colored scorpion, hatchlings riding her, raises her pedipalps. 

Haunted town.  In the predawn, muffled breakers.  Roosters.  A cat slowly eases itself into a garbage can.

Without language, appearance still asks questions of itself.

He has been photographing pariah dogs.  You must be inside pain to feel it.

I wake to hear a woman outside the window pishing warblers.

The boy points out to me a cartography of snail tracks on a broad avocado leaf.

Not the sentence is for the words but the words are for the sentence.  Two of us withdraw to make room for the third.

A parrot walks from the table onto the boy’s outstretched hand.  He picks it up before he sees the half of its wing shorn cleanly as with a scissor.

Ligature 4

The bioluminescent undersides of squid render them invisible to predators below.  That the radiance of the boy’s anger might protect him.

Walking the dog and stepping on a patch of repaired road, I remember the soft spot in his head.

You’re deaf as a beagle.  No, you are.

Can I feel the tide’s drag on the turning earth increase each day’s duration?

A hair in my nostril has gone white.

In absolute night from my bed, I hear him aiming for the toilet’s center.  The sound deepens, voice finding its register.

Scientists call it an entangled system.

We survive Christmas, his face pressed to the smooshed bosom of his grandmother in a house so immaculate, the spider in the seam of the ceiling stands out obscenely.

Like a star at the outskirts of the galaxy, and slung around by the gravity of dark matter.  For now, he goes where we go, but he does not belong to us.

I begin to begin my sentences leaning toward him, taking a deep breath.  He relinquishes the conversation with a contraction of his pupils.

What is for one of us the throb of the immediate is, for the other, the imminent mundane.

When napalm hits my brain, he takes on the tranquillity of a blinking newt.

She finds a photograph of him at seven.  The sheer expressed of his face.  As among Michelangelo’s early drawings, there is a copy of Massaccio’s lost Sagra, the consecration.

We search our memories of him for a certain unity of characteristics that would hold through the permutations he now submits to us. 

When it clings to the wire-and-rug surrogate, lab technicians shock it again.  Instead of releasing, it clings tighter.

Throwing himself into the back seat after wrestling practice, mat burns on his cheek and forehead.

His muteness an onomatopoeia of the rising moon.