Is wind across the Kansas prairie. The babyface mashes stiff potato
on his plate, in the still a tin-train clockface bangs into at four am,
in lieu of a mother's kiss, left ere ten years luring on tiny cyclones
of bathwash hair in a motel pool. His lower body frets, mouth
flouts all militia talk -- the only vocable in the room is Timothy.
His silence is mine as well. Five hours past the Oklahoma City
blast--where once I saw a moon as large as Mammon's gold--
a TV game show chattles trailer homes along a river bed, Rte 80,
a thousand miles from where he is, where I am, intent on AP news
that can't print anarchist at all. In an orange deathvest V-neck,
his photo cameo irks our firefighter's grimace as he reckless
cradles a one-year old who cries as she dies, heading for some
heavenless place that none of us will ever image. Blurred clockface
child who's mine and not mine, dust devils ebb your blond curls
to the edge inferno, where Echo Company still drills heads off
Iraqui farmers in old underwear, bulldozed into a foxglove grave,
a dream of food I wake to night after night, a thousand miles
from his name. Timothy. My age ten years ago -- my brother's heart.
No one laughs at a battalion's petting or dancing. The silence
calls in realm after realm of mother at the table, her whispering
and disappearances, the glop of spuds now greening on his plate.