From his mouth comes the tiny sounds of sparrows,
the room one moment bright, one moment dark,
electricity fluttering under leathery skin,
elephant eyes shaded, but one can guess the look,
after the end of excuses, the hammer laid aside,
the ladder to anywhere now long dropped,
only the tiny sound of birds, and silence.
Perhaps there’s the memory of birth,
or the memory of the story of his birth,
in the back of a cab, a mother and father,
hissing, wind hot through open windows,
and the radio promising the twelfth caller
a trip to Bordeaux, and a car backfires like a gunshot,
and his head is coming out, bloody, blue, screaming.
He must’ve been cradled, been read the familiar stories,
perhaps in Spanish by women who wished he was theirs,
or hated him. Other times, he sat in his unlit room,
listening to his parents’ voices.
Or they would sit together in another room,
listening to the voices on television.
In the car, he sat in the back, watching their heads.
There were parties where he stood waist-high among adults.
Years passed. A dog died on his watch.
Another was put to sleep.
There were times of happiness.
The little family laughing at the dark wood table.
Science experiments. A man wrestling alligators.
His mother biking him through orange groves,
and the wind, and the smell of citrus and manure.
At night, things were still. Perhaps a cat, moaning.
A breeze rustling trumpet flowers against thin glass.
The pages of a flashlit magazine, under the covers.
His parents hung over him like old trees.
The toilet was in its own, tiny room,
the wood stained darker than walnut.
The thick sliding door, the steady fan,
a pile of books. Everywhere, piles of books.
A miniature Japanese garden was enclosed off the study.
It was too small to walk in.
And the tiles and the beveled glass
and the signed prints of Escher. A quiet life.
A life like the fish in the black-bottom pool.
A life that moved along the streets unseen.
A life that took others, a life that was taken.
