C. Dale Young

in memory of amy clampitt A single seedling, camp follower of arson...

Kingston, Jamaica Lamps have begun to light as evening, alluvial, fills every crevice in the courtyard, fills Devon House, alone with its marble columns, its verandas and esplanades empty, the plantation gone, and the fields, the courtyard a tourist attraction now: glass ashtrays etched with boys too large to be clambering coconut trees, statuettes of women too smooth to be burdened with baskets of fruit on their heads, stoneware with doctor birds captured in the shallowest bas-relief, key rings carved in the rough shape of the island; and now even the hummingbirds are spoken of as jewels where once everyone drowned in leaf-filtered sunlight.

Already his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn't even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had driven up into the mountains to "take the waters," as our parents put it. Our parents' instructions were simple: they would be in one room, our sister in another, my brother and I in yet another. Down the dark hallways as dark as tunnels, down through the strong smell of minerals and seawater, the attendants led us to our rooms. What was that smell? Sulfur? Aluminum? There was the smell of salt, but it was not the salt of the earth, not the sea itself. The old man told us not to sit in the water for more than fifteen minutes at a time, to drink lots of cold water, to scrub the salts into our skin, to take care of each other. And then, he left us. We took off our clothes, did it without thinking. "You get in first," is all he said, his voice sounding more like my father's, his voice having changed almost a year ago. His body had changed, too. Sitting in the pool, my thoughts began to swim in the vapors, the steam, I felt nauseated. I wanted not to look at him. I wanted to look at the tile: blue and blue-white with the depiction of a terrible vine twisting and creeping around the tops of the walls. When he got out and lay on the tile next to the pool, his abdomen was already sculpted, and the thin trail . . . He knew I watched him, and he loved the admiration. When I finally got out, my head dizzy, my heart racing from the heat, I lay myself down next to him. He scrubbed my back with a rough sponge, pulled me against his chest as he scrubbed behind my ears and under my arms. There, in the steam, I was cleaner than I would ever be again.

Because the silence of the dead, that blue expanse of sky about to ashen here above my head, is easily ignored, our tears are blamed on flowers whitening limbs of trees, the very air, with hymns of summer pollen no one hears except for women—old, devout. And now, these humid months, dispute them not: midsummer has no name among the dead, no Latin root to which it can be traced, no swarm of conjugations to decipher. So little left to write this summer, my mind now weak in handling form, which I still cling to just the same.

I love. Wouldn't we all like to start a poem with "I love . . ."? I would. I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines in the word "parallel," love how words sometimes mirror what they mean. I love mirrors and that stupid tale about Narcissus. I suppose there is some Narcissism in that. You know, Narcissism, what you remind me to avoid almost all the time. Yeah, I love Narcissism. I do. But what I really love is ice cream. Remember how I told you no amount of ice cream can survive a week in my freezer. You didn't believe me, did you? No, you didn't. But you know now how true that is. I love that you know my Achilles heel is none other than ice cream— so chilly, so common. And I love fountain pens. I mean I just love them. Cleaning them, filling them with ink, fills me with a kind of joy, even if joy is so 1950. I know, no one talks about joy anymore. It is even more taboo than love. And so, of course, I love joy. I love the way joy sounds as it exits your mouth. You know, the word joy. How joyous is that. It makes me think of bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions. I love the way the mind runs that pathway from bubbles to dandelions. Yes, I love a lot. And right here, walking down this street, I love the way we make a bridge, a suspension bridge —almost as beautiful as the Golden Gate Bridge—swaying as we walk hand in hand.

As if the sky during its emergence —when it bubbled its way up out of the sand, cooled and then sublimed into vapor that blued the dank grey of the atmosphere— left a residue of cobalt behind to remind from where it had sprung into existence, the water rising from this spring appears unearthly, as only things close to earth, born of earth, can: its blue deeper than the heart of a sapphire. Today, when faced with such a spectacle, we have, as usual, only two choices: the paralysis of awe, or the quick nonchalance of acceptance. But what about the Spaniards who came upon this spring before there was a platform lined with inner tubes, before there were wooden walkways elevated to slow their impending rot, before their was a faux beach, its sand stolen from the spring’s center? Did they run in with their clothes on convinced that this was the fountain of youth? Did they laugh believing themselves drunk, mad, asleep—dead, maybe? That afternoon, late summer, we did not swim, chose instead to wander out to the edge of the walkway, not a word between the two of us, only the wind. Unlike us mere mortals, the trees had long since been impressed, preferring, instead, to maintain postures incompatible with the work of sycophants.

In that old story, the boy is depicted as delicate, lithe, and beautiful. Ovid had it wrong. Yes, the boy was beautiful, beautiful enough to capture a god’s attention, but he was not delicate. He was anything but delicate, his muscles toned from working the fields. Listen to me; the gods are fairly conventional. A lovely woman is transformed into an old hag, a too-slow voyeur becomes the quick stag to be chased and shot through by a single arrow. So, in the case of this young man, he must have been strong, anything but delicate like these flowers. The gods are convincing when they need to be. Believe me, they are honey-mouthed and persistent. The boy had to be strong, but he was not stronger than the gods. He was seduced; who isn’t seduced by immortality? In the field, the boy was every bit the archer as the god. He was just as powerful with a spear, a slingshot, or a discus. Ovid writes that Apollo loved the boy, loved him more than any living thing on this earth. But we know better. The gods love only themselves. In the field, a clearing ringed by trees, the boy did not try to catch the discus. He was running from it, running from the god who took pains to aim so as to slice him clean through with a single shot. You see, this is not love. A god commanding spilled blood become delicate blue flowers is not love.

I learned to hide my wings almost immediately, learned to tuck and bandage them down. Long before the accident, before the glass shattering and that scene going dim, dimmer, and then dark, before the three fractures at the axis, three cracks in the bone, it had already begun. My voice had begun to deepen, the sound of it suddenly more my father's than my own. My beard had started growing, my bones growing, my bones sore from the speed of their growth, and there, at fourteen years of age, the first tugging of the muscles between my shoulder blades. It began as a tiny ache. It was just a minor irritation. Day after day passed, and this ache grew, and then the tips of the cartilaginous wings began to tent my skin. Father Callahan had already warned that in each of us there was both potential for bad and good. When trying to shave for the first time, I nicked my cheek, the bleeding slow but continuous. Standing there, dabbing at this small cut with tissue paper, the first tear surprised me, the left wing heaving through that fleshy mound of muscle between my shoulder blades and then the skin. I buckled and, on my knees, the right wing presented itself more rapidly than the left. When I stood, there in the mirror, my wings outstretched with their tiny feathers wet, almost glutinous, a quick ribbon of blood snaking down my back. You wonder why I am such a master of avoidance, such a master of what is withheld. Is there any wonder, now? I had no idea then they would wither and fall off in a few weeks. When Father Callahan patted my head in the sacristy and told me I was a good boy, a really good boy, an extraordinary boy, I wanted to be anything but extraordinary.