Bogeyman, and: On Showing Off, and: New World

Bogeyman

Because I wanted to learn what harm felt like,
and because that turgid bulge of flesh
not quite restrained by her waistband
repelled me faintly, I pushed my cousin
down the stairs. It shocked me, too, a little,
the way a kitchen knife can startle
with a cut so fine and unastonished,
coming from a place you've always known was there,
you might have wanted or half-created it.
The basement shaft smelled of new lumber,
green-white as a chestnut, perhaps,
collared upright and planted to soften
the raw subdivision carved into the hill.
Older cousins had hissed tales of a man
living down there, hid like a weevil
in beans and flour, behind homecanned
produce and preserved meats put away
for the Last Days.
                  Sometimes, outside playing
I swore I saw him, roaming empty
cul-de-sacs, the lost and ravaged numen
from a landscape now bulldozed into clay.
I thought his name was Armageddon,
who wedded one to fear or to the stray
excitement that might split apart a day
with a lissome jolt to the nerve, like tin-foil
chewed on a dare, an unadmissable pleasure.
No mercy, we'd aver, through
Chinese water torture, Indian burns,
and games of Smear the Queer.
And though I should have feared myself,
that ecstatic cruelty on the stair, I didn't.
No remorse, only a sort of curiosity
towards my own self, my breathing slowed
as the hunter's heart between whose beats
he'd address his target. I imagined
the pad of her back resistant to my palm,
then felt its sudden quick assent. Over years
our parents shoehorned it into accident,
but couldn't, at the time, keep from asking
why? Whatever lie there was I couldn't give it.
Because, I said. Just because.

On Showing Off

Look who pretends that she's a sprite,
Who kicks and prances in self-delight
On mossy rocks at river's edge;
Whose sneaker slips, who tries to catch
Herself, but anyway careens
Into the chute above McLean's
Heavy and thaw-maddened falls.
I panic only when I surface,
Bullied by currents, caromed from rock
To snag as riffles buoy, then duck
And suck me down. Above I know
I'll drown, but there's a mind below
Whose rapt velleity I am.
A minute at the most, yet time
Expands to overflow its measure;
Time enough to muse and loiter
Through this water the way a thread
Of smoke dissolves in air, or shade
Blends into light. Beneath me crowds
Of river faces - chert and quartz-
Grow more dearly distinct than any
Who run and cry onshore. An eddy
Veers me toward an outcrop where
A pair of hands can grasp my hair,
To lift and let me fall again
To earth, its paler oxygen.

New World

Through lack of Latin or some fertile sleight
      Of mind, the vagrant thought
Arising from inland seas I've sailed
While reading isn't any Island of the Earth,
But the terrariums she used to cultivate,
      Planting orbs recycled
From rummage sales. Apothecary jars

And snifters archipelagoed our house,
      Each filled with its paradise
In small and forgotten until now. I feel
Disloyal, as though by failing to nurture
Memories of my mother's gardens in glass,
      Her life concedes a little
More to her dying that one blunt summer.

Columbus drew his planet breast-shaped;
      Cartographers once mapped
Their orbis terrarum centered like a navel
Circled by seas from four cardinal streams,
And wrenched the skies to match a concept.
      So I, as children will,
Chivvied time, myself the firm terrarum

I knew as me, while others seemed like stories
      Or blank, uncharted seas.
I'm left now to imagine what fired her love
For versions of perfect and crystalline spheres,
If, then, the caravels of metastasis
      Already rowed her blood.
Confounding isn't just her hobby's pleasures:

Those Edens that fit a...