Vessel

Branching the way blind fingers splay across

The face they’re reading, trees trace the backyard

Ditch sop that their shadows drop off into

Space,

an abyss where I hear a neighbor boy’s

Voice cursing an exhilarated, out of its mind,

Unappeasably inventive flow of

“Fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy that maybe

He imagines the neighborhood can't hear?—

or is his tongue wired

To some source of inspired but as yet unknown

Intelligence that radiates from all of us and he

Is its mouthpiece, speaking it to the trees

That screen him from me listening to his

Unrelenting arias, predestined like birdsong

Flowing unbidden, of four-letter almost

Erotic keening over something I know too,

Everybody knows?—

and even if all it is

Is the “fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy

Of April budding in his mouth and sending down

Roots to some anti-self that sprouts and shadows

Him as it croons and shouts the song of its difference—

Even then, this Billy whom I don’t think twice about

When we meet in the alley and slap palms

Or I see him playing alone on the swings of big kids’ slide,

Even then is he the vessel

of some signal that uses us,

Down in the abyss irradiating him so that just this instant

Whatever that other uses him for he can’t resist:

His voice an instrument of blissed-out torment

Until that grip flings him loose—

Who knows which of us it chooses to penetrate

Next, making us suddenly sweat or shiver,

That influence bathing everything budding

in profane rays.

Source: Far Side of the Earth (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003)