The Fall: Poems

Red-And-Silver SchwinnI would never learn.She would never love me.When I wriggled on that cruel seata blind force–perhaps hope–smashed me into the sprinkler system.Even when I wheeled it,the bike jack-knifed.It seemed the fallwas planned within me.Polite with rageI refused trainer wheels.I carried the frame tenderlyover newly sodded lawns.Once it was my burdenthere was nowhere we could not go.SunlightI trained a magnifying glass on the ant with the crumb and he stepped away from the pool of light. I held the beam wherever he was going. At once he shriveled to a tiny black line whose ends rose slowly to meet each other. I aimed at my hand and sensed that fire infinitely distant, close, then inside me: when I dropped the lens I felt no comfort and called my father's name.NorthboundA bell tolled six times on an island in the fog and my father turned toward it.Angelus or a signal? Where the reefs must be, a buoy chimed at random.How to row toward a voice once it has fallen silent? He listened tight-lipped:bitterns, gagging laughter, slap and hiss of Castine, creaking oars, my crying.A white hand cupped us so we faced each other entirely inside the mind.Then he began stroking powerfully, a vein swelled on his forehead, his blue knuckles rose like pistons,even I could sense us circle under the spell of his right arm, and he lost himself countingin his exile's language– twenty, a thousand, as if our home lay beyond those enormous numbers.