Cave
By Mark Levine
I took my boy to hear an echo.
He wanted to hear one. I wanted him to.
We wended through a half-formed unintelligible
brushy wood to a place I knew called “cave.”
It had openings at both ends
and could be seen through, not into.
Nor was it a tunnel, strictly, though it passed
through the ground, though it went somewhere.
It was like stepping into a telescope
unseen, into the dark distorted center.
The walls were arched and laid with glazed tiles,
orange, aqua, muddy green and so
streaked with nervous lines where water had run down,
where water must have trellised down still.
It was not clean. It smelled of piss.
Chicken bones, empties, old rubbers, mold.
Echo, I called. So did my boy.
But his voice was small—birdscratch—it
got all lost inside the echo my voice made;
pale echo, barely one.
That was when I had a boy.
I’m quite sure I did.
I wanted one, back then, when I had something to offer,
when I wasn’t in this place, where light passes through me,
when I wasn’t like this,
which is what,
when I wanted one,
as he, poor boy, wanted me.
Copyright Credit: Mark Levine, "Cave" from Travels of Marco. Copyright © 2016 by Mark Levine. Reprinted by permission of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
Source: Travels of Marco (Four Way Books, 2016)