Little
Boy Blue
His teeth don’t chatter
all night like they used to.
all night like they used to.
He sings with frogs, polishes
the wings
of beetles, sits on the lips of
wells,
legs hanging down,
like a pair of thirsty tongues.
He sad-clowns for the barn owls
–
tough crowd but he coaxes
a couple of hoots before they carry
their heart-shaped faces and
hunger
for warm, wriggling things
off into the dark.
He builds tiny churches for
ants
from pine cones and feathers.
He stares into nests for hours.
Eggs obsess him. And baby mice:
so bald and blind;
so terribly pink.
Into the bark of an old elder
tree,
hunched near the edge of town,
he scores, each evening with a
rusty blade,
a different boy’s name –
Tim, Owen, Arthur – hoping
one day to read back his own.
Take a walk that way
and he might greet you, opening wide
his ribcage, like a coat
lined with counterfeit watches.
and he might greet you, opening wide
his ribcage, like a coat
lined with counterfeit watches.
You won’t
see him, but a faint
ticking will trouble the air.
ticking will trouble the air.
Clouds remind him of something,
but he can never remember what.
He lets the wind play him like
a flute
– or an oboe when he’s blue.
In lonely meadows, scarecrows
sway to his tunes.
sway to his tunes.
He makes snow angels and asks
them
questions until they melt into
the ground.
None have answered yet.
He’ll sigh from time to time,
so softly,
upon your resting eyelids,
and this is how he steals sleep
from you.
No comments:
Post a Comment