Our Cousin Mark
by A. Diao Lavina
You were away, also
then. Waking to the wail
just before morning, the call
for the faithful and somewhere
a life irretrievable
but we had ten o'clock sun
and a boy who sang,
his hands soft and unlined.
African daisies that needed
tending and golden cosmos
billowing in his hands.
He fell forward as a struck
man into the sea, slowly
with no sound but a rushing
unleashed between his ears.
The duplicity of the body.
We didn't know enough, no
one did in the long line
and always stood in front
another one saying, Sorry
until he outgrew the bed his
mother could no longer
make, his body rebelling
against its impotence,
the limbs reaching
into places they no
longer knew were there, past
the edge of all that was
unremembered. He was
handsome. A good son.
The house was clean. He used
to make dinner. He would give
her flowers. His hands
which were soft when I bathed
him later would feebly curl
around St Jude's picture.
In the end even that was
torn from his hands, and fell
a bent and tired thing
a shadow on the ground.
No one knows when loneliness
began, or where exactly.
Whether it is the dust
on the leaves outside our houses
the hardening skins of trees
the places we reach only
to leave. We wait and wait
for a time to ask questions
and the answers are faces
you have already seen
and know by heart as your
own though we wake a distant hour
though we do not know the cold
hard floor and ash-smudged
silence of dark temple walls.