I
When we met you had already kept your brothers alive. You were nine, hopped up on the kitchen counter with a twirly green phone cord wrapped once around each finger. Across the city your mother stood by the window in the office above the factory floor, door closed to the noise, she explained how to feed boys.
When we met you had snuck past the border guards: back seat shallow breathing, nostrils flaring, stare straight ahead, holding hope in your mouth. If they had asked you a question, it would have escaped like a moth into the night air.
When we met you had already carried bricks up ladders nine hours a day until at last your shoulders turned to marble, and new ropes of muscle bound your waist. The immigrant Atlas.
II
I rumble through the rooms of this red house, double back for a pair of crumpled socks and up the stairs to the laundry room. Then, a bathroom. Straddling the toilet to reach-behind-retch at the sticky rust-coloured dust. I pull pillows out of cases and prod the shredded wad of bloody tissue from a nosebleed brown-blood-ago that a kid tucked behind his bed post why-who-knows. My web is weaving, twisting behind me, thick like an umbilical anchor I turn back on myself ten times in a day. My late night thoughts are a fog holding up this roof. Shuffling, tinkering, fluffing, I press dust into deeper corners. I hold-see-behold but as I revel, I hide, I tire. If you listened you would hear the rattety-tap of me rickety-picking my way along, getting it done, glass-eyed.
III
I eat my lunch at the counter and fill the room with my breath. The sun strikes a wood beam and I can taste those caramel colours. Tiny bright birds flit by the window as they patter and jab around a big blue Jay. They play. You play too: basketball games and new tattoos, beers after work and motorcycle lessons. You make crisis look like fun. I have no minutes in my day, but you seem to pluck them from the air between us like coins from behind my ear, you magician. Where once I said: I’ll be the water sloshing in the bathtub when you stand up and step out steaming – Now I’ll say: Here hold this. Tether me to you because once I’ve wandered by the bird feeder and farther than the maple tree, once I’ve dredged my hands through wet clay spinning and shaken loose my painter’s eye, once the electric winds catch my sails — you’d better hang on tight, my gossamer kite can travel oceans and I won’t be left behind.
