The Hearing

The nurses had shouted into the labyrinth       of his ear long after he stopped answering,

telling us to keep talking to him, too,       that the hearing is the last to go:

All my life he loved to tell this story       about Marshall, a neighbor boy

he'd been in school with—pale, fevered       six year old, and how he had sat

right behind him, close enough to hear       the tubercular wheeze in between

the coughing everyone heard, close enough       to see the blood bright in his handkerchief

before he was kept home and no one saw him       anymore. And he remembered the first

summer after Marshall died, the grieving       mother coming over to them at the church

revival picnic, her stony appraisal of him       and, as though he had no more hearing than a mule

standing there, saying out loud to his mother—       Kate, you'll never raise him; he looks just like Marshall

did the year before he died, as though death       had somehow made her expert—or prescient.

And he had run, afraid, out of hearing,       past the stunted, consumptive plots,

the graveyard lambs, toward the men beginning       to cut the watermelon that had been floating

all day weightless in the spring pool, the knife cleaving       the dense, glistening green-marbled body that fell

rocking into perfect halves like lungs       healthy pink, and he took breath after

deep breath to spit out seeds, like those words,       slick, dark, unheard—as he would tell, and tell it.