Today's poem is by Tom C. Hunley

A World Inside This World
       

I love watching Bigfoot
in the famous Patterson film,
glance cast over her shoulder
as if at a sudden takeoff of birds,
arms swinging in time to some mysterious
rainforest music, no need to break
stride before returning to her
own thoughts and the ground before her.
So what if all the evidence shows
she is just a man in a suit?

All the evidence shows that I too
am just a man in a suit,
too hurried to walk like that
or even like the young — unsteady, unsure
where they're going but with years
to get there. My size ten Rockports
already look small next to the size eleven
Converses my fourteen-year-old autistic son
got for Christmas. His enthusiasm for fashion
is legendary, as is his passion for the smallest,
most surprising things. Every day he tells me
how many button-down shirts
he owns (twenty-three at last count).
Every day he says, Guess what,
I've been in high school for 91 days,
92 days, 93 days, 94 days, Wow!

Dickinson wrote, The heart has many doors,
and on the rare occasion when my son lets me in
his room to show me, once again, a You Tube video
of the ten fastest race cars, or to tell me snakes
move twelve miles per hour, I feel I've entered
a secret, mythical place, where my son rules everything
in shouting distance, and it's okay to shout in his world,
okay to repeat a name a hundred times
because the syllables taste so sweet,
okay to bay and rage without pretension
or say just what's on your mind even if it's been there
for months and you've been saying it over and over,
and typical ways of seeing the world
seem like cubic zirconia dreams I've been sold
that keep me from smelling
what Wallace Stevens called the odor of stars,
from finding a world inside this world.

Then my son says, That's enough.
He needs to walk alone. My presence
threatens to despoil his forest.
I walk out, once again exiled from my own heart,
GPS signal lost, contacts gone,
habitual ways of seeing the world
knocked to the floor like books from a coffee table.
I never would have believed before this
that such a creature could ever exist.

Tweet

Copyright © 2024 Tom C. Hunley All rights reserved
from The Loneliest Whale in the World
Terrapin Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission