Son

And he was a son, wasn't he, firstborn, given to anchoring, to rooting a man, the father. And he had a mother did he not who was the water roots need unrooted in herself. Straw spun toward goal in the apple light—he is fruit and seed between branch and earth. They sky suffers the ground to imitate it.

*
All light like luck comes from elsewhere, shaped or sacrificed or spilled among shadows that need it, leaves, to breathe. By your leave I am your son. By my caul I accede to sonhood's crippling rays. Sit down and taste this meat, bare forked from the soil you sprang from. A test of sibilance, serpent to say mine.

*
Dream of earth in town: all brown, the streets teeming with UPS men. Everyone tracks a package into and out of doors. All strangers exchanging gifts they'll never open for others correctly wrapped and labeled. I exchange a small box for a big box, the big box for a bigger box. When the time is right I find an alley to set the box on its end in. I scan the barcode and step inside.

*
Hair long as a woman's, my mother, but curled. An electric field's fluid inward. She danced round a cup of coffee, eyes down. Smoke drifted from the wrists of her coat like ruffs. And what are you to me, she sang, and what are you to me. Salted away beneath the table to hear her toes tap the top. And what are you to me, my son, and what are you to me.

*
A sandwich stops this singing. All afternoon he watched atoms get stuck on the window like flies. Everyday the sun paints his house with another layer of thinnest light. The world becomes more visible, less accessible. Coming and going not going, wenting. As heat comes and goes with the forced air gone. The urge to count syllables. To count pairs of headlights catching the headboard, head-on collision with lights from the ear.

*
To play a part in the pageant bespeakes a bespoke inheritance: her hair, his lips. Her bones, his heat. Her mask, his mask upside-down. Her refraining kiss, his tennis strokes. A dry moistening of wet parchment, papier-macheing the skull. Which if made was well-made to contain and interact. Hope's a bone home balancing on top of a parade float and an arm to wave its way. Paddling to spare the creek's child.

*
Given: a present. A perspective-glass. Toward the son or daughter to be disclosed later. Behind a shadow getting longer: shadow of the coast, shadow of a sea. A singularity fixing to be solved by the discovery of time like parts per million of gold in a cubic mile of sea. You will be me, will to be yours, a went won't will when disclose by an advocate. My end.

*
Some bark for that tree. Some lunge for the falling apple. Some wait for inspiration. The pathos of this is passing.

*
His egg is a jail I sprang.