When Abused Children Play

When Abused Children Play

It’s not human sacrifice and sadistic

torture that is being celebrated, rather

it’s Christ climbing to his feet after

the cruelest of all electric shock treatments.

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                In a letter to William Empson

On the other side of the fence

is the saddest patch of grass--

can you see it, worn to mud

or dust in the middle, like the seat

of a boy’s pants, one who fidgets,

who is never still and can’t be, or the mind’s

high voltage with the same bull’s-

eye ground lit and lit and lit

and then swallowed though

each time it’s slower and slower

the throat swollen like an end stage

sufferer of scurvy.    See how rain,

never now a relief, beats

on the cracked patch (cracks can

deceive, remember?) and the debris:

the flat-tired bicycles, one

with a training wheel stuck up

in the air above the pedal of the other

twined like two young stags fighting.

Beside it all, a thrown-up-quick plywood

marker boundary line (it blew down

once in one of the winter’s

milder winds) rotting from the bottom

up.  From here I see  all the knots,

all kinds of faces and ghouls that don’t

look at all unlike two pieces

of art I saw yesterday, paper beside

paper, the drawing and casting

of bones.  How is it we find enlightenment,

how is it we depend on the protections

of skulls, how is it we keep saints,

Jerome mostly, in the room with us

quilled in this technique, curled into

roses or dinner plate size hyacinths and all

on black ungloss, what does it do

to us, the depth of that shadow

and how, to bring it back

to the now child-

less patch of grass: how, maybe can it all

breathe again, in an absolute

sigh of relief to be free of those angry

thumping, locked in feet?  A mother

screaming a three year old screaming a boy

four or five riding down

the slope of the hill over and over

and over and over past the now dis-

embled plastic swing set, his worn path a line

to the woods where maybe he peeks

sometimes in the drizzle, (mother even

pushes them out in the rain saying

Jesus Christ get the fuck out

of my face)  (that was the first

thing I heard her say after they moved in.)

Today their gonness is almost palatable.

They put all they could in the U-Haul of their life

and drove off with it, leaving three

bikes, piles of dog crap, and a bald patch, a breathless

pause the heart sometimes makes

between beats

when the muscle is tired

worn almost through the skin, electric

sizzle burned ends revival still

miles and miles away or caught in traffic

at another more pressing accident where the EMT offers

oxygen, a soft toy, a grim jaw

lifting them all from the burning wreck.But that's
another family and another story.