Vessel
By Tom Sleigh
Branching the way blind fingers splay across
The face they’re reading, trees trace the backyard
Ditch sop that their shadows drop off into
Space,
an abyss where I hear a neighbor boy’s
Voice cursing an exhilarated, out of its mind,
Unappeasably inventive flow of
“Fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy that maybe
He imagines the neighborhood can't hear?—
or is his tongue wired
To some source of inspired but as yet unknown
Intelligence that radiates from all of us and he
Is its mouthpiece, speaking it to the trees
That screen him from me listening to his
Unrelenting arias, predestined like birdsong
Flowing unbidden, of four-letter almost
Erotic keening over something I know too,
Everybody knows?—
and even if all it is
Is the “fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy
Of April budding in his mouth and sending down
Roots to some anti-self that sprouts and shadows
Him as it croons and shouts the song of its difference—
Even then, this Billy whom I don’t think twice about
When we meet in the alley and slap palms
Or I see him playing alone on the swings of big kids’ slide,
Even then is he the vessel
of some signal that uses us,
Down in the abyss irradiating him so that just this instant
Whatever that other uses him for he can’t resist:
His voice an instrument of blissed-out torment
Until that grip flings him loose—
Who knows which of us it chooses to penetrate
Next, making us suddenly sweat or shiver,
That influence bathing everything budding
in profane rays.
Copyright Credit: Tom Sleigh, "Vessel" from Far Side of the Earth. Copyright © 2003, by Tom Sleigh. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Far Side of the Earth (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003)