Artifacts of the Weigh In

There would be photos
which gave Son the appearance of performing
a slow procession of fists,
but when put into Mother’s mouth,
the baby was arms all a flail
in a motion that resembled an attempted embrace.
So she did,
while Father snapped pictures.

Light, weather, air and vessel are words to search for Mother thought to Son.

Father noun: 1. an armful of miseries with the years on. 2. an atmosphere of vicissitudes: usage, breeze gone gale. 3. a testimony of train tracks, or sometimes an angry train, see usage at 2. 4. an arrangement, spoken in relation to Mother, following the phrase, “our marriage was.”

The camera hung from Father’s neck
and mother watched him weigh his arms
like the spread wings of some unwelcome creature or storm.

The boy’s face
a tiny bucket.

**

Son’s Lonely Eye Poem

He held the idea of holding the world.

His mind lied: he was the biggest man in this room.

He took faith in fingers and fatigues.

He understood trees as green and himself as tree.

He made his way without making or a way.

He hugged his knees swaying where knees were eyes bulging,
choked from looking for things that could turn him into a coffin dressed in flag.

He tooled the erstwhile decorated homecoming.

He stood the fire and fell swoop.

He couldn’t shoulder the world—
he saw jungle and a leaf cover hill shaded and broken by light.

He could hear the sound (of) falling.

He thought of carnage not as (an) act but as word,
the way the sound made it so.

He said his name aloud, as loud as hiding during war allowed.

**

Son

Given the dinning room table they commenced a ritual of gathering. Father mostly wore his dissonance as a derby under the guise of a jovial man. Mother made coffee and plated store bought cakes in the shape of the sun. Son (a father himself) introduced stories as exhibits that flittered the senses and whittled the time until night made it late enough for leaving. His children went unspoken of like Father’s derby and Mother’s offerings to the sun and her autumnal weight. This scenario mollified them into a pattern of sameness, as each fall Father would remove the awnings from the house front to salute the impending winter, and each April he would raise them again for the spring. It wasn’t long after Mother laid down her autumnal weight for good that calamity palpitated the picture house in the spring colored outside. The neighbors noticed the awnings didn’t rise and the newspaper told them why. Inside Son felt Mother casting a sad face over the unmade sheets and sink full of dishes. One morning after raising the awnings with Father, Son stood outside as a sundering of sparrows confronted the treetops. He thought of his children. His open field eyes sun-stung blinking. But hard.