The boy picks flowers for his mom,
And is chastised for bringing them death.
His tenderness engenders violence, yes,
But as tenderness it would be seen,
If somehow or another he had been
Able to be somebody else.
Memory flits before me now:
I could not enter to her sorrow,
But we shared the muddy grass
around the stone-cold, concrete bench.
I ran my hand along her back,
Words long since decayed.
Responsive knots knit in her sweater
Raised a soft antistrophe,
An answer as she breathed the minutes by.
I sit and wait, unanswered and
Or unobserved,
She thinks or stands to leave.
She smiles and frowns
Or puts me in her pocket
Without seeing a word.
A gift to a probable recipient,
The potentiality of presence.
To bear with the perhaps-grieving,
Imagined state of a friend—
Perhaps you were a friend for the passage,
Only to be known for swelling waves
Over wooden decks sodden with sea.
But my arms remember our movement shared
As we pushed and pulled with heavy oars
The rhythm of our homeward journey.
A prayer, unanswered ten years down the line,
Abandoned, I thought, but
Like a sun-exposed tape deck sparked to life,
Its rewound memory skips through static
And moves my heart to dance