Two Spacewalking Astronauts
He’d had a dream, come looking for us, maybe
but we three could no longer fit in a double, so they’d traded.
The switch must have happened when I was asleep, in a dream
of a whole other story, for when I turned half-circle in my trench,
there lay a smaller, ropier version of my husband— little head,
my coloring, gracing the pillow.
In a trick of first light, man was now boy, grown down in the night;
which implied the reverse – across the hall, stretched long under decal stars
and distant planets, hairy limbs dangled off the ends of a twin bed.
With my hands pressed together, slipped under my cheek, I rested,
refrained in my breathing as daylight increased. I watched his eyes pace
and wander –a world wholly his –under translucent crescents, copious lashes.
—
At The Pool
He wore goggles, unaccustomed to the feel of water
in his eyes. He turned somersaults below the surface
to show me his mastering of the gravityless, while I sat on the side,
ankles in. Here at the pool the boys strut skill, while girls
cluster in observable interiority. He goes under, twists, pushes out
against the wall towards her, a girl refracted at the blue line
where she’s immersed, where from underneath she must appear
a wavering blur over pillared legs, white like porcelain.
Both newly teens, I’m aware he might be a thing, for she too
has been following his movement below the bodied surface.
She catches me watching them–his stealthy approach, then away
with a flash like a fish before arriving—unhooked, hazy intentions
a dream unawakened—and appearing instead beside me.
I meet her eyes across the surface and we smile reflexively wide
at each other, and I remember–I’m the mother–both of us sides
he’ll swim towards or away from. All day, rough concrete has been
gathering the heat of high summer, warm beneath the thinning
towels we’re dripping into, his bleach-stiffened hair drying in spikes.
—
Gideon Riding His Bike
I saw Gideon on his bike tonight – he took the center of the street.
Late springtime dusk, most traffic cleared, even I was idling.
He threaded the yellow lines before my car, jacket flapping, head cocked
to one side to listen, to gauge my car’s intent. No helmet
obscured his adolescent profile, showing evidence of change since last spied
in the neighborhood. Though given green, I did not mean to pass, but
to stay the road a while, as though the light were amber, sinking slow
like the sun confronting the horizon, growing bigger as they meet.
Now he stood upon his pedals, pumping thighs decidedly and headed
towards the incandescent glow behind the loosely parted curtains of his home
just down the street, brothers already unstacking plates to set the dinner table.
A glance in my rearview mirror at a sky fluorescing pink, I see there’s
no one else behind me; that I’m the last one heading for a house already
set before me in the sinking light.
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