Once I was wood and my heart was a knot.
From a block my brain was slowly cut —
legs, arms, knees and nose, my all of me
peeked out at the prompt of father's blade.
Peach-soft, I took shape like a lesson.
I took paint like skin and soaked it in.
I had a hat. Shoes I didn't know were heavy.
Strings at every joint to tie life to me:
fifty kites I could have made and been happy.
But this, too, was me: lacquer and dead
stare, dreamless in a crude heap
of false boy. Like a narrow bed or bad wish,
my father made and unmade me.
How life took me I do not know.
No star or fairy made of moon fell upon me
to make me this lock-kneed shadow.
No cricket sang to my pink ear in the dark.
Of the dark I have so much to say:
the strings burned away, hissing like wet fuses,
and for those moments, newly lunged,
I breathed hardly at all in the dying light,
there in the pile of dust on my father's old desk.
In places the paint still hung in flecks
like ash: a stranger would have thought me
rescued from a sudden fire. Or mourning
something ancient. And then it was gone,
the light, and I was alive, filled with hollows
I hadn't known before. A mouth and belly,
a windpipe. My spine, once balsa, now bone,
saw to line itself with flickering pain.
Into the floor I spilled myself and was ashamed.
My father found me and with me wept.
To my little bed he carried me and locked the door.
All you have known of me is wrong —
or a lie, the sin that so long kept life from me.
Life swallowed me like a whale
with nothing to make light in its dark gut —
not my father's lantern and not my body,
once wood, which may make a fire but not a boy.