Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay

A fount and then silence. A none. An ellipse

between — his breath through

the seams of our windows. Whistle

of days. Impossible bowl of a mouth — 

the open cupboard, vowels

rounded up and swept under the rug.

He’d coo and we’d coo back. The sound

passed back and forth between us like a ball.

Or later, an astral voice. Some vibrato

under the surface of us. The burst upon — 

burn of strings rubbed

in a flourish. His exhausted face.

In an enclosure or a cave it is difficult to gauge

one’s volume. The proscenium of the world.

All the rooms we speak of are dark places. Because

he cannot see his mouth, he cannot imagine

the sound that comes out.

To my ears it is a language. Every sound

a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan

in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst.

The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence

a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid

a want. We make symbols of his noise.

Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small.

By the sleeve. By the shirttail. His light touch

hopscotching against my skin like sparrows.

An insistence muscled and muscled again.

Red-faced in the kitchen and in the bedroom

and the yellow light touches his eyes

which are open but not there. His eyes

rest in their narrow boat dream and the canals

are wide dividing this side from this side.

When called he eases out of his body.

His god is not our words nor is it

the words from his lips. It is entirely body.

So when he comes to us and looks we know

there are beyond us impossible cylinders

where meaning lives.

The mind circles the mind in the arena, far in — far in

where the consonants touch and where the round

chorus flaunts its iambs in a metronomic trot. Humming

to himself in warm and jugular songs.

A pocket in his brain worries its ball of lint.

A word clicks into its groove and stammers

along its track, Dopplering like a car with its windows

rolled down and the one top hit of the summer

angles its way into his brain.

We could be anywhere, then the navel of the red moon

drops its fruit. His world. This stained world drips its honey

into our mouths. Our words stolen from his malingering afternoon.

When the air is true and simple, we can watch him tremble

for an hour, plucking his meaning from a handful of utterances

and then ascend into the terrible partition of speech.

Because a reference needs a frame: we are mother and father

and child with a world of time to be understood. The car radio

plays its one song. The song, therefore, is important.

It must be intoned at a rigorous time. Because rigor

is important and because the self insists on constant vigils.

Always, and he insists on the incorrect forms.

The wrong word takes every form for love — 

the good tree leans into the pond,

the gray dog’s ribs show, the memory

bound to the window, and the promise of the radio

playing its song on the hour. Every wrong form

is a form which represents us in our losses,

if it takes us another world to understand.