Sonogram

You want to say the bell to a trumpet. A hollow sound. The sound of emptiness becoming

whole. Whole as a loaf of bread, and the hungry sound that echoes.

A sound thin as water? Or deep, deep as the echo of the womb where the one you thought you would raise was gone, unexpectedly

on a night of hard rain, when she knelt in the bathroom, the thumb-sized bloody loss. How many years ago you cannot count except

with your thumbs.

A thumb-sized sound.

That small. That full of losing. How large it grows. And you are lost in the forest of what did not happen,

searching for the way back to before, but the black birds have swallowed all of the crumbs.

So you begin again, begin in the present tense, and the patter of the children in the fountain downtown, and there is Elmore from the Roosevelt hotel in his wheelchair, the sound of his wheelchair creaking through the puddles in the moments after rain, and you are sitting there on a bench, not smoking, trying to catch the sound of the girls clapping hands and Elmore raising his arms in the spray of the city fountain, in the sudden sunlight, somewhere like 6th street, in somewhere where after the voices stop, you look down, to find the tracks of his wheelchair, and the sound so long ago that took his legs, the sound you never heard of his not having legs.

A phantom sound.

Heard our whole lives, for we are all wheeling, with our amputee limbs, toward that sound of someone so near

you can hear them breathing.

When they are sleeping.

It is not much to ask.

It is not much to ask, Are you there?