Shadow

Shadow

Golden chalice, good to house a god.  Please

            don’t tell me how the story ends.

                                                Cormac McCarthy

                                                The Road

Aside from his skin, and how it puckered

            and faded like the worn wool of winter,

And his fair hair a curled periwinkle

            in the sink two or three times

a year.  Aside from the first shirt and short

            pants I made his second spring

and how perfect they slid, straight

            to the knee and never further (aside

from saving each mistake even with the rising

            cost of fabric) it’s his shadow, his constant

shadow I miss  the most.  Because it was still

            in the room when he’d stepped briefly out,

it hinged him to the floor the wall…and even

            though his straight- from- play tang

lolled, or his just from mass resin or his cold

            soapy bath...how I’d walk through and it would be

on me and in me, his evanescent smell.

            Too soon ruined and spent.  And that shadow.

I’d step on it and we’d feel no crick or misery

            while I watched it slide across the kitchen

or the porch or the lawn or the sidewalk

            or the church isle or the grocery

isle, or how the ceiling or the sun at once

            possessed him and grew him bigger

or smaller than I ever could, and how, all at once, this flat

            lid has taken even that, has made him   

lightless.  The floor.  The wall.  The furrows

            and the kerfs.  Now I smell shadows

sitting here, clutching his cassock

            to my nose in the dusky balm of his empty bed-

room.