Death of the Death of Youth

I see the summer children in their mothers, in the way the womb chose them to live, fingers veined into the alley oaks, night bursts their throats, no signal moon. The power out again, I listen for a whistle or car horn, something I might know in all that dark. Now the kids are in the street graphing new homes with their voices, a living sound, a wound of air I do not understand. Their hands knead the asphalt, one throws half a brick and the blood that arrives unseen is no one’s. The noise of Time is not sad, it’s diagramed somewhere inside the land. We honor this emptiness. A door appears, a flame. A girl at the end of the block lights a cigarette, her face assembled from radiance and the acres. The loneliness of her, of me watching her, the nothingness of me, of this room, the receding storm pinioned to the sky. In 1900, an accountant built this house and carved his name on an attic beam— laudanum-sweat through the plaster. The regret of his name there, as if it could conceive, then hurt. The regret history assembles by the highway, the projects, the cemetery, all stacked up, dissected, is not hungry. Walter forecloses next door and mold rises through the sheriff’s arms, clothes spread on the sidewalk for the rats to tame and sweeten. Everyone has a flashlight, a gun. Who kills my history? the kids should yell, spoons carving the sides of cars. I am the man your father was, I think. We are the sons of flint and pitch. I do not exist for us. The past has failed into shapes as if light gathered form from the air, and gave to it a body— the weeds bowing in every direction, in mercy and indifference.