Poem Which Talks Back to Itself

The parents whose boy went off to school

that morning — the police may have found someone

who saw their son, alive, after

they saw him for the last time. Step away!

Someone who saw that elfin face

change, at the word “soda.” Step back!

And change again, and change. And down

the basement steps, down into the earth,

the stairs down into the underworld.

Don’t go there. Close your eyes. Someone

may know the unbearable — someone

in custody. O, “custody.”

A wall of dirt, a wall of stone,

a bare bulb, like the uterus upside

down. No Kaddish, no washing of the dead,

no linen shroud, no company

through the long night.

Whatever honor can be kept for him — 

his pure and whole honor is kept

by his parents, for the rest of the hard

labor of their lives. All this time,

they could not die, so they’d be here, in case

he came back. Unspeakable. And now,

the one taken in for questioning cries out,

“I don’t know why, I don’t know why.”

He will not tell. Is he holding that hour

to himself. Did he hold that child in his hands,

39 years ago.

Vanished. The spirit mattered away.

And the dear matter — don’t. The bag,

the truck. The landfill or the barge, the burial

at sea — the dispersal, the containment within

the bounds of the oceans, crested on top and

cragged at the floor where the innards of the planet pour

up, molten, through fissures — contained

in the air bound by the atmosphere, the

clouds of mourning pressing against

the inner surface of the casing. Shut

and the prophets. At his birth, the history of the earth began.