The Burning Boy, and: Abyss of Birds

The Burning Boyafter Freud

Begin with a father, exhaustedby the long night watch at the bedsideof his child. When the boy dies,the man retires to the next room,door ajar, and goes to sleepleaving behind the child's bedfringed in candles, in the wordsof an older man who murmurssomething to God or the boy,difficult to tell, something softso as not to wake the child,not yet, or to wake him and notat the same time. Think of prayeras an answer, the kind that endsin a question, looking upto shudder the flame on its wick.It's a story with no known source, for all we know a fable,mysterious as money changinghands, as the visions we spendour nights retelling, sleeping the sleepof strangers, blowing the coals.Soon the old man too drifts off,and the father dreams the boycomes back to life, that he standsoverhead, clasps the father's arm,and says: Don't you see, don't you seeI am burning. You can guessthe rest: how the father wakesto something brightening the door,the old man asleep, the child'sarm burned by a fallen candle.You can guess the reasons why.Say the father, as he slept, sawthe neighboring light, the literal.Say he recalled a day the boylooked up in a fever and saidthose same words. Possible.What a father doesn't know hurts,true. And yet a certain comfortflickers in the mouths of doors.It too wants to live, to preserveits blindness beside him as he sleeps.Sure, if he had slept any longer,who knows. But a near disastergave the boy a second wind,if only briefly, a reason to movefurther into the father's mind:a savior come back to save himselfwho is past saving, past needingto be saved. And the father knew this,or his dream at least, when it openedits eye on the boy's returninggesture. Don't you see, don't you, as if suffering begets sufferingto bring a child closer. To rememberby forgetting, defying the endof the story, the moment the boybecomes two bodies, two lives lostdeep inside a father's, to lifthim from his sleep like smoke.

Abyss of Birdsfor Ann

What it must be to watch the musicfade out of your fingers, your clarinetslipped into the felt of its casketlike a child's puzzle, the small-wingedhinges of its valves grownstubborn, stiff. Call it the swellof something foreign in the hand,or rather the foreigner that isthe hand. The black flower of the bell,the long red scar of a surgeon'scut, what are they now againstthe inevitable. Once a nursetold you to go ahead and practicethe piece you most love. Strangely,a Quartet for the End of Time.She could not know just how farthe reach. Still you hear the birds therein your stillness, how they riselike ashes. You hear the composer'sabyss, as he put it, locked inside his stalag where his notes took the shapeof an Angel's sword. No more,says the sword, the sweep, the prisoner'sfaith. You have no such faith.The body moves its way and youmove with it. But with these birds,the way you listen, with the sharpnessof the instrument, its voice continuesto defy a language. Not unlikethe origin of language. Somewhereyour hand stiffens about a pen.You listen for the slice of the wing,the wind surprising a reed, how,like music, you never quite arrive.You could lose yourself for hours.That's the odd mercy, you say,the difficulty of the comfort here.Like silence after a piece you lovewhen, however clear the mind,it is impossible to knowwhere music ends, the world begins.