Wrinkles

Aware of the top of his head as if for the first time
He watched the clouds glide stoically past
As the loose flapping corner of the balcony screendoor
Mesh gestured wildly to the billowy behemoths to stop
But there is no getting on such buses
He thought without knowing that he thought
For in his mind a hand, a screen, a flap, a cloud,
A bus, a sense of one’s head capped uncapped
Itching not tender so tender still young
Did not register as thought.

He wanted ice cream, but it was cold, and if he
Didn’t ask, he would not have to hear his mother’s
Hesitating voice again saying we don’t have any
But we have cold milk and a banana.

He takes a toy in hand, just to have a toy in hand,
Because he knows he is a child, he knows he
Ought to play, although his mind wanders where
He is not sure children’s minds should go, to places
He is not old enough yet to know how to describe
Like candlelight like ocean cartoons in black and white
TV flicker like yogurt commercials what is yogurt
Like bedsheets and their menacing messages in
Wrinkles that are never the same but always saying
Something to the waking or the sleeping eye and
Hand, stirring not yet awake, not yet asleep, not yet
A hand

Holding a toy, waving at a cloud, play-rehearsing the
Futility of similar hand movements he will make
In days and years and decades to come

When the sheets’ terrain of shadows mean some
Other things no less mysterious and foreboding,
When he will have traveled so far from the womb
That he strains to recall what milk and bananas

Have to do with the sadness of a sweetness
A mother feels too poorly endowed to provide.