Against Prognostication

I have not written about my son’s future,
not yet. How he will read and reread
the Audubon Field Guide and memorize each bird,
how he will wander off under dappled light
and return home in a squad car. Not because
I can’t imagine the way he will carefully
hold his hand above his heart
after he has unfurled the skin
from his meaty thumb, or how he will rip apart
a frog hind legs to jaw and how he will feel after.
I have not talked about the day he will wrap
his friend’s car around a tree and somehow
walk away, leaving the scene limping
home to sleep in bloody sheets.
Not out of fear, though this genealogy hints at it.
This reticence is caution not reprimand –
what can he learn, anyway, from such a history?
That day will still come when he opens his palm
above a flame and smells himself burning.
Perhaps, by then his father will be brave enough
to let him have his own life, but I will not say,
be comforted, for comfort comes at a price.
And I will not talk about what comes next:
a girl, a kiss, a field of grass. His thin heart
tearing as she leaves. That part of the story
is all anyone wants, denouement
and then the singing, operatic camerawork
pulling back to reveal his loneliness in the grass,
blue herons stalking through a salt marsh at sunset,
ten glaucous gulls and a black back on the gables
of the paintworks riding out a storm.

Jeffrey Thomson
Against Prognostication is from The Country of Lost Sons (Parlor Press, 2004).