Nothing So Beautiful
after the Rosenhan Experiment, 1973
Yesterday, my son lay lazily
on a log
shirt stretched between one moment
and the next
along the branches beside him
A book spread open
across his belly
eyes closed
to better sound the confession
of colors in the park
despite the fact that sugar-drenched
bark cut into his back
leaving a red mark
Today, he sits in sterile
silence
the gray wave of doctors
monitoring
the earwig of fear
that crawls in
and out of the years
of rain
in his wracked
brain
Between these two moments
lies a secret room
Where you can still get close to things
Where a tiny ocean laps at your hands
Where you understand the choice
between this life
and this life
Yesterday, I had faith in the spindle
of an aspen
and the taut skin
of a flat blue sky
I knew the alphabet
rolling across the tongue
the way the wind knows far-
flung leaves
Today, I am a body
curled up on my bed
The memory of his fragile
smile bleeding
through teeth and bone
The smell of hope
folding back into the meadow
of another
country
Between the two is a secret room
Where we find this story again and again
Where summer rain slips beneath our feet
Where mind is what we feign waking to
I’m not sure what kind of dream I imagined —
That we were more than stones
cast into this shadow-field
rippling away from ourselves
Translucent trespassers across
this hand-sewn night
Small animals darting out
into the febrile
light
* * * * *
Under all there’s little difference
I no longer want to be a person
Maybe a cat walking the fence line
Or a dog barking at a car, a footprint
At the edge of the earth, or nothing at all
Not this nest of silence, this loud drought
Of words, this shiver across a lake
When I was a boy, I would follow any
Dark tunnel into lost, weaving anger
In and out of ribs until I escaped
This world tumbling toward oblivion
Or became a cockroach eating hair and
Dried skin — and still you don’t know what I mean,
Do you, having lived, like me, inside
Another for too long