Eyes Like Leeks
It had almost nothing to do with sex.
The boy
in his corset and farthingale, his head-
voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin
was not
and never had been simply in our pay. Or
was it some lost logic the regional accent
restores?
A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant
laborer playing Thisby botching
similes
and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend
he’s seven—touched his mother’s face last night
and said It’s
wet and, making the connection he has had
to learn by rote, You’re sad.
It’s never
not like this for him. As if,
the adolescents mouth wherever California spills
its luminous
vernacular. As if, until
the gesture holds, or passes. Let’s just
say
we’ll live here for a while. O
habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young
friend
it’s never not some labored
simulacrum, every tone of voice, each
give, each
take is wrested from an unrelenting social
dark. There’s so much dark to go around (how
odd
to be this and no other and, like all
the others, marked for death), it’s a wonder
we pass
for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance:
minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard
and now
she weeps for a lover slain by a minute’s
misreading. Reader, it’s
sharp
as the lion’s tooth. Who takes
the weeping away now takes delight as well,
which feels
for all the world like honest
work. They’ve never worked with mind before,
the rich
man says. But moonlight says, With flesh.
Copyright Credit: Linda Gregerson, “Eyes Like Leeks” from Waterborne. Copyright © 2002 by Linda Gregerson. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Source: Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002)