Dear K.O.P., for the first dozen years of my life
I never looked at myself. I believed mirrors
bore no true social significance partly because
they hung on walls. Convinced, then
in the last thin quarter of the century,
that I was a colorless American boy without detail
perhaps I should confess my very first brush with love
involved a white girl and empty dryer box.
I smelled, if I recall, the scent of damp cardboard,
which was a scent not altogether unlike my father’s
olive green Army-issue boot socks, and so it was
that as I and my little cob-webbed nymph
(as I have thought of her ever since) attempted
to make a singular glistening smile, I thought again
and again that my father was walking barefoot
nearby with a boot in each fist. I felt
the ominous pre-tingling a soldier feels
when he waits in a trench at the start of a great war
though that was not a year of war, if you recall,
but a year of myriad insignificant misdemeanors
and dumb disputes. I thought too, that the girl
had dropped down into my arms from a nest
of the July, late afternoon darkness blooming
in the upper corner of the box because her hair
danced and dangled across my brown wobbling head
like something made in the belly of a spider,
and I half wondered then when I would learn
what magic it was that gave some creatures the power
to spin a thread almost thinner than light. I decided
I’d ask my father later when I sat on his chest
full of sprawling powder-white women,
and removed his boots and then his socks,
but of course I didn’t, having been struck dumb
by something (The color or length of his toes,
the tiny grid pattern the socks left on his ankles?).
It doesn’t matter what, since any boy who spends
an afternoon with a girl in a box is prone to forget
his questions. I too had a bizarre über-hunger
for companionship and have gone on having it,
as I presume you have, ever since. When I pressed
my palm against the girl’s back, I felt first,
the impression of her skin inside the white blouse,
and then the jagged bones of her spine
and I thought of the tiny, tiny spines
in all the animals inside and around the box
when we found it there at the edge of the park.
The stray dogs had spines shaped like my father’s
belt, the squirrels and field mice had spines
shaped like the smallest limbs of the saplings;
I thought briefly of grasshopper and ant bodies
before considering the spinelessness of the earth-
worms uncoiling in the mud beneath the box.
Mostly I learned what I know of myself
by holding my tongue still and I’m wondering
how it was with you? Anyone can go back
to the summers that were clear as water,
and I’m assuming you too sat at opened windows
and listened to the world. Perhaps I shouldn’t say
yet what it was you and I were waiting for, Cousin,
but I’ll say it never arrived.