Cut the binding cord of human love
The world of dew
Is the world of dew
And yet and yet
I pulled to the side of the road
When he announced that we bought him
From a special baby store
He came home from preschool
And opened the refrigerator
Where’s my fucking milk
It was not his birthday
But he kept blowing out the candles
On his cousin’s cake
He wheeled his tricycle up and down
In front of the house in a rage
You’re not my parents
Sometimes Gabriel and our dog raced
Back and forth across the museum lawn
Until Rocky got tired out
Curators paused to watch him run
With so much energy he was like a wound top
He could almost fly a kite when there was no wind
In those days we did not have leashes
Or ropes for our children in airports
We skipped along behind them
No runway or landing pad
No nursery or laboratory
No public or private school
Would ever be able to hold him
It was like giving a tropical storm
Some time out on land
It was as if a TV show ran constantly
In his mind the innocent kid
Kept breaking out of prison
He was a little Bartleby
Of the nursery he despised kindergarten
And preferred not to
He clung to the couch he held fast
To the chair we dragged him out
Of the closet kicking and screaming
For an after-school ritual he rushed around
The house turning over furniture
And throwing books at the wall
He pushed over a lamp and tossed pillows
Through the door he nearly broke down
He kicked out the window twice
He had a fit on the front lawn
In the driveway in a friend’s house
He locked himself in the bathroom
He started yelling at the referee
And stomped off the field in a fury
It was a bad call
He wanted he needed to buy something
Every day a new video system an iguana
A baseball bat a football helmet
He wanted he needed to go right away
To the arcade in the Galleria
Where you won tokens that brought rewards
Someone told us he had King’s Syndrome
He thought he was royalty
And everyone should treat him like a king
We understood the desperation of the therapist
Who locked the door and sat on him
When he tried to leave the room
The sun is tired
And so I’m hoisting him up
And carrying him on my shoulders
Over the hill or through the park
Around the pond back to the car
Home from the ballgame
He’s scrambling up my back
His bare legs tightening
Around my neck
I’m grasping his ankles
Giving him a seat in the grandstands
Just above my head
The sun wants to see
The stage over the crowd
And look down upon the world
He’s bounding onto my shoulders
In the swimming pool
And diving off
I can still feel his slippery feet
Why is he so scalding
Hot on my shoulders
I’m lifting him over my back
And striding through the woods
Like a tree walking with an orb
Branching out of its trunk
He’s perched atop my ladder
At the fireworks display
But he’s restless
And wants to bolt
I didn’t come here to watch the fireworks
I remember the five-year-old collector
Who started with four samurai slammers
Teens with attitude
He liked the way ordinary kids
Morphed into Rangers and piloted Zords
Deprogrammed from the dark side
I remember the boy who needed Beanie Babies
And then graduated to Transformers
Comic books and anime cards
Magic cards we called cardboard crack
I remember the collector who liked the hit
Of buying or selling it didn’t matter what
He sold lemonade and cookies
And handmade paintings
Hastily brushed
Which he hawked for a dollar apiece
In front of the Menil Collection
Across the street from our house
Maybe someday little boy
Your work will be hanging
Inside the museum visitors said
While the artist just smiled
And nodded
And took their money
I remember the boy who never cared
What he bought or sold after he bought
Or sold it it’s all over now
He loved cartoons where nothing is final
Everyone gets flattened and then gets up
And starts running around again
He did not like to remember
His tics were always worse
When it was hot
He did not like to remember
Wiping his face like a third-base coach
Giving signals to the batter
He did not like to remember
Days of obsessive eye blinking
Nights of touching his hair
For a while he developed
A heavy sniff almost a snort
People moved away from us in theaters
He did not like to remember
His tantrums at school after school
They did not get along
He did not like to remember
Teachers and therapists
Tests he did not want to take
He did not like to remember
Drugs that made him lazy and fat
They overmedicate kids now
He told anyone who would listen
He’d rather buy a stogie
Drink a beer smoke a joint
He did not like to remember
His diagnosis for Tourette syndrome
Or pervasive developmental disorder
Not otherwise specified
He knew something was wrong
He did not like to remember
The population of his feelings
Could not be governed
By the authorities
He had reasons why
Reason disobeyed him
And voted him out of office
Anxiety
His constant companion
Made it difficult to rest
Unruly party of one
Forget about truces or compromises
The barricades will be stormed
Every day was an emergency
Every day called for another emergency
Meeting of the cabinet
In his country
There were scenes
Of spectacular carnage
Hurricanes welcomed him
He adored typhoons and tornadoes
Furies unleashed
Houses lifted up
And carried to the sea
Uncontained uncontainable
Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes
Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble
Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything
For his art he dedicated himself
To the Great Work
I admired his single-mindedness
All through my twenties
I argued his case
Now I think he was a jerk
For skipping his daughter’s wedding
For fear of losing his focus
He believed in the ancient enmity
Between daily life and the highest work
Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies
It is probably a middle-class prejudice
Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova
Should have raised her son Lev
Instead of dumping him on her husband’s mom
Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed
I was not worthy of it
Lev never considered it sufficient
For her to stand outside his prison
Month after month clutching packages
And composing Requiem for the masses
I argued with Rilke and Akhmatova
All the years I shuttled Gabriel to school
And then locked down with their poems
I argued with them while I scribbled away
In the pizza joints and video arcades
It is a true error to marry with poets
John Berryman concluded
Or to be by them
He’s singing the Poe Elementary School blues
He’s singing the Shlenker School blues a day school
For the offspring of upper-middle-class strivers
He’s singing the Montessori School blues
He’s singing the Monarch School blues
For kids with executive function disorders
I give you the educational consultant blues
One lived in San Antonio one in Idaho
He’s singing the Little Keswick blues
A therapeutic boarding school in central Virginia
Where many drive up and say it feels like home
It did not feel like home to us
He’s singing the Devereux Glenholme blues
Where they searched boys for contraband
And treated chewing gum like shooting heroin
He’s singing the Franklin Academy blues
Where nonverbal learning disabilities are
Overcome and everyone heads off to college
He’s singing the five Quint two Intercession blues
The transitions that could not be made
The dreaded summonses
I give you the no-mercy rule
The let’s-get-thrown-out-of-school-
And-hire-tutors-to-graduate-from-home blues
He’s singing the Dubspot blues
The fantasy of Reason and Record
The electronic-music-has-died blues
There are no more academies to attend
He was not befriended by study
A therapist called him one of the lost boys
For his eighteenth birthday
As a special present to himself
He took himself off all medications
All those drug regimens for tics and tantrums
For disorders that were being named
By the month and year
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Mood disorder
Oppositional-defiant disorder
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
Combined type and bipolar disorder
Mixed type also dyslexia dysgraphia
For a while we were on the Autism spectrum
But then PDD-NOS was dropped
As a diagnosis for the new manual
All those special cocktails
All those weekly appointments
And adjustments by the doctors
Someone had to keep track
Of the side effects of taking clonidine
Adderall Depakote Ritalin
Strattera Abilify Concerta
Levoxyl Paxil and Trileptal
In the morning and at bedtime
Risperdal the special culprit
I fought against and lost
The argument lasted for years
He hated the way it puffed his face
And ballooned his body sixty pounds
He pleaded for drug holidays
The evening with its lamps burning
The night with its head in its hands
The early morning
I look back at the worried parents
Wandering through the house
What are we going to do
The evening of the clinical
The night of the psychological
The morning facedown in the pillow
The experts can handle him
The experts have no idea
How to handle him
There are enigmas in darkness
There are mysteries
Sent out without searchlights
The stars are hiding tonight
The moon is cold and stony
Behind the clouds
Nights without seeing
Mornings of the long view
It’s not a sprint but a marathon
Whatever we can do
We must do
Every morning’s resolve
But sometimes we suspected
He was being punished
For something obscure we had done
I would never abandon the puzzle
Sleeping in the next room
But I could not solve it
Fatherhood could not be conquered
My friend Donald concluded
It could be turned down in his generation
I dialed it down and let Janet deal
With the medical doctors the various
Specialists who plagued us with help
The psychologists the psychiatrists
The neuropsychiatrists the speech therapists
The art therapists the occupational therapists
Have I left anyone out what about
The head of the Movement Disorders Center
Who told us he had two thousand patients
In the seventies I was one of the fools
Who took the side of nurture versus nature
I thought sociobiology was a crock
Think of the brain as a switchboard
Dr. B. said stiffly
He has a lot of things knocked out
I didn’t want to I couldn’t help it
I pictured a system of circuits misfiring
Wires crossed and darkened
He is going to continue to develop
All through his twenties he explained
He’s going to be thirty before you know
It was good news it was hopeful
But it made me think of the celebration
When everyone jammed into the dining room
For the giant cake with my picture on it
And I watched all my friends
Eating pieces of my face
And the Father the Law
Who should have been handing down
Commandments from on high
What was he doing all those years
When he should have been reassuring his wife
And taking charge of his son
What was he doing when he should have been
Standing fast and overruling the experts
Who were guessing what to do
He should have been teaching him
Character teaching him values teaching him
To become the man he was meant to become
What was he doing the Father the Law
In the exact middle of life
But fighting for his vocation
Ghost of my earlier self
I see you muttering to yourself
And pacing up and down
In a room on the second floor
Of the house all night every night
Through your late forties
What were you seeking but escape
The transport and the desponde
ncy
Of the old makers
Poet who labored so hard at your craft
On a scarred wooden desk
It is late now
It is time
To turn off the lamp
And come down from your study
After we moved to New York
I asked him if he was lonely at school
And he said I’m used to it Dad
He wanted to come home to the city
With attention deficit disorder
Where he was less lonely
He found his natural habitat
In the dense forest of buildings
Hovering over the stores of Manhattan
He wore baggy shorts and a bold t-shirt
If the music is too loud you’re too old
And sang along to his headset on Broadway
Every now and then he glanced back at me
A middle-aged father weaving
Through traffic behind him
Sometimes he paused for me
To catch up to buy him cologne
Or two pairs of sunglasses for ten bucks
He liked designer knockoffs
And rolled along incognito
Among the derelicts and crazies
He was a fifteen-year-old in the city
No more no less
But I imagined him as a colorful unnamed bird
Warbling his difference from the robins and sparrows
And scissoring past the vendors on every corner
I kept thinking of him as a wild fledgling
Who tilted precariously on one wing
And peered back at me from the sudden height
Before disappearing over the treetops
Take the lamp out of the mud
By the side of the road
Uncover the drum
The torch has sputtered
On its side in the rain
Light it again
Take it down to the corner
Where a group of boys grows
In the dark like a garden
He met them fooling around on Broadway
They thought it was funny
The way he’d say anything to anyone
The group invited him to hang out
Gabriel Page 2