Transfixed

Son

by Forrest Gander

It’s not the mirror that is draped but
what remains unspoken between us.  Why 

say anything about death, how

the body comes to deploy the myriad worm

as if it were a manageable concept not
searing exquisite singularity? To serve it up like

a eulogy or a tale of my or your own
suffering. Some kind of self-abasement.

And so we continue waking to a decapitated sun and trees
continue to irk me. The heart of charity

bears its own set of genomes. You lug a bacterial swarm
in the crook of your knee, and through my guts

writhe helminth parasites. Who was ever only themselves?
At Leptis Magna, when your mother and I were young, we came across

statues of gods with their faces and feet cracked away by vandals. But
for the row of guardian Medusa heads. No one so brave to deface those.

When she spoke, when your mother spoke, even the leashed
greyhound stood transfixed. I stood transfixed.

I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I love.
Her one arterial child. It is just in you her blood runs.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/son/amp