Eyes Like Leeks

It had almost nothing to do with sex. The boy in his corset and farthingale, his head- voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin was not and never had been simply in our pay. Or was it some lost logic the regional accent restores? A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant laborer playing Thisby botching similes and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend he’s seven—touched his mother’s face last night and said It’s wet and, making the connection he has had to learn by rote,You’re sad. It’s never not like this for him.As if, the adolescents mouth wherever California spills its luminous vernacular.As if, until the gesture holds, or passes. Let’s just say we’ll live here for a while. O habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young friend it’s never not some labored simulacrum, every tone of voice, each give, each take is wrested from an unrelenting social dark. There’s so much dark to go around (how odd to be this and no other and, like all the others, marked for death), it’s a wonder we pass for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance: minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard and now she weeps for a lover slain by a minute’s misreading. Reader, it’s sharp as the lion’s tooth. Who takes the weeping away now takes delight as well, which feels for all the world like honest work. They’ve never worked with mind before, the rich man says. But moonlight says,With flesh.