Neighborhood Watch

 In my small hand I carried a cough I once held within. It would not speak to me nor could it be seen. I was four or three in the winter yard. Apples heralded snow. A high wooden fence kept me in so the wind couldn’t bite my ears but did. My parents brought and left me on the grass. In front of me go away, behind me another breath to bear. No birds or dogs or winter flies, no bowls or nuts for toys. No blankets to break or books to wonder or pine cones to wear in my hair. A shadow’s grip, this nothing, a song could begin. Show them the strip, at least one, of crosses with darkened tongues. I never was several of them, I never called the door or balked when they wanted to watch. What remains, less people, is all. I tossed the cough into the air to dislodge from me the day. From time to time I taught the limbs to sway, to cease, to scratch, erase. All day long in winter I played and stuffed the earth with dreams. At night I knew I would grow again. 

Tom Whalen’s books include The President in Her Towers, Elongated Figures, An Exchange of Letters, Winter Coat, The Grand Equation, Dolls and two translations of short prose by Robert Walser, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories and Little Snow Landscape (NYRB Classics). His work (poetry, fiction, translations, criticism) has appeared in Agni, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Film Quarterly, Georgia Review, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, The Literary Review, The Missouri Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Witness and other journals.

A Song for Tom