A Boy

from Some Trees (1956)

        I’ll do what the raids suggest,
	Dad, and that other livid window,
	But the tide pushes an awful lot of monsters
	And I think it’s my true fate.
	 
        It had been raining but
	It had not been raining.
	 
        No one could begin to mop up this particular mess.
	Thunder lay down in the heart.
	“My child, I love any vast electrical disturbance.”
	Disturbance!  Could the old man, face in the rainweed,
	 
        Ask more smuttily?  By night it charged over plains,
	Driven from Dallas and Oregon, always whither,
	Why not now?  The boy seemed to have fallen
	From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.
	 
        That night it rained on the boxcars, explaining
	The thought of the pensive cabbage roses near the boxcars.
	My boy.  Isn’t there something I asked you once?
	What happened?  It’s also farther to the corner
	Aboard the maple furniture.  He
	Couldn’t lie.  He’d tell ‘em by their syntax.
	 
        But listen now in the flood.
	They’re throwing up behind the lines.
	Dry fields of lightning rise to receive
	The observer, the mincing flag.  An unendurable age.