Look For Me Under Your Boot-Soles
Was it where they lost me
that I found myself?
—Neruda
My mother looks for me in photographs
affixed in books—held by a hospital blanket,
potato arms at the screaming melon of my face.
She turns the page to a kid oozing
from his shirt, betrayed outside a new school.
She diverts wet eyes to a box of sparrows,
then back to black and white. She knew
before she started her baby was going, gone.
My brothers, they wisely prefer not to look.
When they collect the practice bats
and rope them snug and heavy in a canvas bag,
when they lock the door and parade with family
beneath a garland of Sunday bells,
when they grill bun and burger with impunity,
they’d just as soon I didn’t appear, a genie
in black hood and suspenders, and I don’t.
My oldest friend looks for me at night flat
on his back. Bleary eyes search heaven
for the compass of my sword. His lip curls
with a finely formed insult, unflung.
The familiar bars of Symphony #1 (for ice
and bottle) caress the ear, and he flops to
his feet. To other friends, I’m an unwritten
diary, a cribsheet denied, a burned map.
Once a year my wife looks for me as courtesy,
jumps the bed with a needle of antique broach
and stitches the pillowy lumps beneath
our hand-pieced quilt. She calls in French,
cuddles under a snore before my silent answer.
Behind a screen, the dog points all day
to the spot he saw me last. Night drops like
a shot partridge and the tail quits wagging.