Psychomachia

At the Mind Museum, you can walk to the back,

step on several large buttons on the ground,

and watch parts of the brain light up: the frontal lobe

for decision and memory, the temporal lobe

for smell and sound, the occipital for sight. I try

to make my toddler son laugh by hopping

from one button to the next, watching each lobe

light up along the way, but he will not leave the prison

of his melancholy. My son: how he loves to revisit

the most difficult point of conflict in a picture book,

or the moment at which his favorite car heaves

a difficult sigh at the pinnacle of a movie’s emotional

arc, or the promise of injury if I take a fall. My son,

so distant from other children in his sadness.

Just the other day, at the pool, he gazed

at the boys and girls splashing and shrieking

and said, Look. The children are having fun,

as if he were an anthropologist in a foreign land.

If these are his musings at age two, one can only

imagine the life that must follow. Through a dark channel

he was born; to darkness he is most drawn. Easier

to write than say the guilt I feel for giving him

the sharp pain of melancholy. My son, always

in the world without husk or shell, it is as if his heart

throbs on the outside of his body, as if his brain

has no skull to absorb the assaults that strike it.

Today, I watch him writhe in the pain of a tantrum —

a typical kid, this is what they do, everyone assures

me — and usually I rush in, unwittingly increasing

his sense of emergency. Instead, today, I stand back,

relinquish the role of skull and skin, watch his mind

unfurl like a medieval tapestry. In that moment

of my feigned disinterest, his head is no longer head

but battlefield where Wrath wages a fierce war

against Patience. He is no longer a little boy

screaming on the ground and throwing plastic trucks;

instead he is a creature engaged in a struggle

to free his enslaved heart from the monsters

whose foaming mouths and hot fumes

and clots of foul blood besiege him

as he gathers his thoughts from the unraveling

of his universe. Prudentius says that fiery Wrath

by her own weapons. I will watch and wait

for my son to close his mind from the anger

and sorrow that fester in him, but if the mind

does not close, I hope I can hide the weapons

before, one day, it is too late.