Gabriel Read online

  Cut the binding cord of human love

  The world of dew

  Is the world of dew

  And yet and yet

  I pulled to the side of the road

  When he announced that we bought him

  From a special baby store

  He came home from preschool

  And opened the refrigerator

  Where’s my fucking milk

  It was not his birthday

  But he kept blowing out the candles

  On his cousin’s cake

  He wheeled his tricycle up and down

  In front of the house in a rage

  You’re not my parents

  Sometimes Gabriel and our dog raced

  Back and forth across the museum lawn

  Until Rocky got tired out

  Curators paused to watch him run

  With so much energy he was like a wound top

  He could almost fly a kite when there was no wind

  In those days we did not have leashes

  Or ropes for our children in airports

  We skipped along behind them

  No runway or landing pad

  No nursery or laboratory

  No public or private school

  Would ever be able to hold him

  It was like giving a tropical storm

  Some time out on land

  It was as if a TV show ran constantly

  In his mind the innocent kid

  Kept breaking out of prison

  He was a little Bartleby

  Of the nursery he despised kindergarten

  And preferred not to

  He clung to the couch he held fast

  To the chair we dragged him out

  Of the closet kicking and screaming

  For an after-school ritual he rushed around

  The house turning over furniture

  And throwing books at the wall

  He pushed over a lamp and tossed pillows

  Through the door he nearly broke down

  He kicked out the window twice

  He had a fit on the front lawn

  In the driveway in a friend’s house

  He locked himself in the bathroom

  He started yelling at the referee

  And stomped off the field in a fury

  It was a bad call

  He wanted he needed to buy something

  Every day a new video system an iguana

  A baseball bat a football helmet

  He wanted he needed to go right away

  To the arcade in the Galleria

  Where you won tokens that brought rewards

  Someone told us he had King’s Syndrome

  He thought he was royalty

  And everyone should treat him like a king

  We understood the desperation of the therapist

  Who locked the door and sat on him

  When he tried to leave the room

  The sun is tired

  And so I’m hoisting him up

  And carrying him on my shoulders

  Over the hill or through the park

  Around the pond back to the car

  Home from the ballgame

  He’s scrambling up my back

  His bare legs tightening

  Around my neck

  I’m grasping his ankles

  Giving him a seat in the grandstands

  Just above my head

  The sun wants to see

  The stage over the crowd

  And look down upon the world

  He’s bounding onto my shoulders

  In the swimming pool

  And diving off

  I can still feel his slippery feet

  Why is he so scalding

  Hot on my shoulders

  I’m lifting him over my back

  And striding through the woods

  Like a tree walking with an orb

  Branching out of its trunk

  He’s perched atop my ladder

  At the fireworks display

  But he’s restless

  And wants to bolt

  I didn’t come here to watch the fireworks

  I remember the five-year-old collector

  Who started with four samurai slammers

  Teens with attitude

  He liked the way ordinary kids

  Morphed into Rangers and piloted Zords

  Deprogrammed from the dark side

  I remember the boy who needed Beanie Babies

  And then graduated to Transformers

  Comic books and anime cards

  Magic cards we called cardboard crack

  I remember the collector who liked the hit

  Of buying or selling it didn’t matter what

  He sold lemonade and cookies

  And handmade paintings

  Hastily brushed

  Which he hawked for a dollar apiece

  In front of the Menil Collection

  Across the street from our house

  Maybe someday little boy

  Your work will be hanging

  Inside the museum visitors said

  While the artist just smiled

  And nodded

  And took their money

  I remember the boy who never cared

  What he bought or sold after he bought

  Or sold it it’s all over now

  He loved cartoons where nothing is final

  Everyone gets flattened and then gets up

  And starts running around again

  He did not like to remember

  His tics were always worse

  When it was hot

  He did not like to remember

  Wiping his face like a third-base coach

  Giving signals to the batter

  He did not like to remember

  Days of obsessive eye blinking

  Nights of touching his hair

  For a while he developed

  A heavy sniff almost a snort

  People moved away from us in theaters

  He did not like to remember

  His tantrums at school after school

  They did not get along

  He did not like to remember

  Teachers and therapists

  Tests he did not want to take

  He did not like to remember

  Drugs that made him lazy and fat

  They overmedicate kids now

  He told anyone who would listen

  He’d rather buy a stogie

  Drink a beer smoke a joint

  He did not like to remember

  His diagnosis for Tourette syndrome

  Or pervasive developmental disorder

  Not otherwise specified

  He knew something was wrong

  He did not like to remember

  The population of his feelings

  Could not be governed

  By the authorities

  He had reasons why

  Reason disobeyed him

  And voted him out of office

  Anxiety

  His constant companion

  Made it difficult to rest

  Unruly party of one

  Forget about truces or compromises

  The barricades will be stormed

  Every day was an emergency

  Every day called for another emergency

  Meeting of the cabinet

  In his country

  There were scenes

  Of spectacular carnage

  Hurricanes welcomed him

  He adored typhoons and tornadoes

  Furies unleashed

  Houses lifted up

  And carried to the sea

  Uncontained uncontainable

  Unbolt the doors

  Fling open the gates

  Here he comes

  Chaotic wind of the gods

  He was trouble

  But he was our trouble

  Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything

  For his art he dedicated himself


  To the Great Work

  I admired his single-mindedness

  All through my twenties

  I argued his case

  Now I think he was a jerk

  For skipping his daughter’s wedding

  For fear of losing his focus

  He believed in the ancient enmity

  Between daily life and the highest work

  Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies

  It is probably a middle-class prejudice

  Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova

  Should have raised her son Lev

  Instead of dumping him on her husband’s mom

  Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed

  I was not worthy of it

  Lev never considered it sufficient

  For her to stand outside his prison

  Month after month clutching packages

  And composing Requiem for the masses

  I argued with Rilke and Akhmatova

  All the years I shuttled Gabriel to school

  And then locked down with their poems

  I argued with them while I scribbled away

  In the pizza joints and video arcades

  It is a true error to marry with poets

  John Berryman concluded

  Or to be by them

  He’s singing the Poe Elementary School blues

  He’s singing the Shlenker School blues a day school

  For the offspring of upper-middle-class strivers

  He’s singing the Montessori School blues

  He’s singing the Monarch School blues

  For kids with executive function disorders

  I give you the educational consultant blues

  One lived in San Antonio one in Idaho

  He’s singing the Little Keswick blues

  A therapeutic boarding school in central Virginia

  Where many drive up and say it feels like home

  It did not feel like home to us

  He’s singing the Devereux Glenholme blues

  Where they searched boys for contraband

  And treated chewing gum like shooting heroin

  He’s singing the Franklin Academy blues

  Where nonverbal learning disabilities are

  Overcome and everyone heads off to college

  He’s singing the five Quint two Intercession blues

  The transitions that could not be made

  The dreaded summonses

  I give you the no-mercy rule

  The let’s-get-thrown-out-of-school-

  And-hire-tutors-to-graduate-from-home blues

  He’s singing the Dubspot blues

  The fantasy of Reason and Record

  The electronic-music-has-died blues

  There are no more academies to attend

  He was not befriended by study

  A therapist called him one of the lost boys

  For his eighteenth birthday

  As a special present to himself

  He took himself off all medications

  All those drug regimens for tics and tantrums

  For disorders that were being named

  By the month and year

  Obsessive-compulsive disorder

  Mood disorder

  Oppositional-defiant disorder

  Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

  Combined type and bipolar disorder

  Mixed type also dyslexia dysgraphia

  For a while we were on the Autism spectrum

  But then PDD-NOS was dropped

  As a diagnosis for the new manual

  All those special cocktails

  All those weekly appointments

  And adjustments by the doctors

  Someone had to keep track

  Of the side effects of taking clonidine

  Adderall Depakote Ritalin

  Strattera Abilify Concerta

  Levoxyl Paxil and Trileptal

  In the morning and at bedtime

  Risperdal the special culprit

  I fought against and lost

  The argument lasted for years

  He hated the way it puffed his face

  And ballooned his body sixty pounds

  He pleaded for drug holidays

  The evening with its lamps burning

  The night with its head in its hands

  The early morning

  I look back at the worried parents

  Wandering through the house

  What are we going to do

  The evening of the clinical

  The night of the psychological

  The morning facedown in the pillow

  The experts can handle him

  The experts have no idea

  How to handle him

  There are enigmas in darkness

  There are mysteries

  Sent out without searchlights

  The stars are hiding tonight

  The moon is cold and stony

  Behind the clouds

  Nights without seeing

  Mornings of the long view

  It’s not a sprint but a marathon

  Whatever we can do

  We must do

  Every morning’s resolve

  But sometimes we suspected

  He was being punished

  For something obscure we had done

  I would never abandon the puzzle

  Sleeping in the next room

  But I could not solve it

  Fatherhood could not be conquered

  My friend Donald concluded

  It could be turned down in his generation

  I dialed it down and let Janet deal

  With the medical doctors the various

  Specialists who plagued us with help

  The psychologists the psychiatrists

  The neuropsychiatrists the speech therapists

  The art therapists the occupational therapists

  Have I left anyone out what about

  The head of the Movement Disorders Center

  Who told us he had two thousand patients

  In the seventies I was one of the fools

  Who took the side of nurture versus nature

  I thought sociobiology was a crock

  Think of the brain as a switchboard

  Dr. B. said stiffly

  He has a lot of things knocked out

  I didn’t want to I couldn’t help it

  I pictured a system of circuits misfiring

  Wires crossed and darkened

  He is going to continue to develop

  All through his twenties he explained

  He’s going to be thirty before you know

  It was good news it was hopeful

  But it made me think of the celebration

  When everyone jammed into the dining room

  For the giant cake with my picture on it

  And I watched all my friends

  Eating pieces of my face

  And the Father the Law

  Who should have been handing down

  Commandments from on high

  What was he doing all those years

  When he should have been reassuring his wife

  And taking charge of his son

  What was he doing when he should have been

  Standing fast and overruling the experts

  Who were guessing what to do

  He should have been teaching him

  Character teaching him values teaching him

  To become the man he was meant to become

  What was he doing the Father the Law

  In the exact middle of life

  But fighting for his vocation

  Ghost of my earlier self

  I see you muttering to yourself

  And pacing up and down

  In a room on the second floor

  Of the house all night every night

  Through your late forties

  What were you seeking but escape

  The transport and the desponde
ncy

  Of the old makers

  Poet who labored so hard at your craft

  On a scarred wooden desk

  It is late now

  It is time

  To turn off the lamp

  And come down from your study

  After we moved to New York

  I asked him if he was lonely at school

  And he said I’m used to it Dad

  He wanted to come home to the city

  With attention deficit disorder

  Where he was less lonely

  He found his natural habitat

  In the dense forest of buildings

  Hovering over the stores of Manhattan

  He wore baggy shorts and a bold t-shirt

  If the music is too loud you’re too old

  And sang along to his headset on Broadway

  Every now and then he glanced back at me

  A middle-aged father weaving

  Through traffic behind him

  Sometimes he paused for me

  To catch up to buy him cologne

  Or two pairs of sunglasses for ten bucks

  He liked designer knockoffs

  And rolled along incognito

  Among the derelicts and crazies

  He was a fifteen-year-old in the city

  No more no less

  But I imagined him as a colorful unnamed bird

  Warbling his difference from the robins and sparrows

  And scissoring past the vendors on every corner

  I kept thinking of him as a wild fledgling

  Who tilted precariously on one wing

  And peered back at me from the sudden height

  Before disappearing over the treetops

  Take the lamp out of the mud

  By the side of the road

  Uncover the drum

  The torch has sputtered

  On its side in the rain

  Light it again

  Take it down to the corner

  Where a group of boys grows

  In the dark like a garden

  He met them fooling around on Broadway

  They thought it was funny

  The way he’d say anything to anyone

  The group invited him to hang out