Poem Which Talks Back to Itself

For Etan Patz The parents whose boy went off to school that morning — the police may have found someone who saw their son, alive, after they saw him for the last time.Step away! Someone who saw that elfin face change, at the word “soda.”Step back! And change again, and change. And down the basement steps, down into the earth, the stairs down into the underworld. Don’t go there. Close your eyes. Someone may know the unbearable — someone in custody. O, “custody.” A wall of dirt, a wall of stone, a bare bulb, like the uterus upside down. No Kaddish, no washing of the dead, no linen shroud, no company through the long night. Whatever honor can be kept for him — his pure and whole honor is kept by his parents, for the rest of the hard labor of their lives. All this time, they could not die, so they’d be here, in case he came back.Unspeakable. And now, the one taken in for questioning cries out, “I don’t know why, I don’t know why.” He will not tell. Is he holding that hour to himself. Did he hold that child in his hands, 39 years ago. Vanished. The spirit mattered away. And the dear matter —don’t. The bag, the truck. The landfill or the barge, the burial at sea — the dispersal, the containment within the bounds of the oceans, crested on top and cragged at the floor where the innards of the planet pour up, molten, through fissures — contained in the air bound by the atmosphere, the clouds of mourning pressing against the inner surface of the casing.Shut your mouth. Put down your pen. Drop your weapon! Stop! In the name of the law and the prophets.