Self-lit

You’re humming through the streets,

self-lit. I have to correct strangers

who touch your head without asking,

as if to bless you or to take a blessing from you.

When we leave the city, you become

a boy hunting locusts. Nature stuns you—

you load up your pockets and want to bring it

home with us, but Nature stays with nature, I say,

a refrain learned from another mother.

You cannot be unpuzzled by things,

but you marshal all your sweet bravado for me,

who tries but never beats you in a game of chess.

I witness the rook and Queen

moving inside your thinking, squaring

and hewing to pathways of wins, losses.

Childhood’s end is always menacing,

apparent places of stars mark its outer limits.

It heaves up in you when you lose,

when you rage, when you’re afraid.

Glowering out of a fever dream, your eyes shine

as you confess in the dark I was the monster.

You show me a hornet’s nest on a bed of cotton,

hold it up as an offering. I wonder with you

at what you hold—

            summer rivers that show bracken corners,

            eye agate marbles,

            daggerwings of our days in the city

            built of strangers,

                      in a country built of sky.

When I pull you close,

what will flee trembles in you.