Young Writers Society

heroes

may paps through dogwood;
the apple-blossoms collapse
like colonial capitals
against a sugarcane uprising,
or ways of life which included
churning butter, hooping barrels,
ordering goods from a yearly catalogue—
my son fights fires, muscles
roping like the keel legend of a colossal squid.
he is sturdy, moves through houses
cantering with flame, smoke
seesawing through pillars, windows
ajar with children, he emerges with basic heaviness
from dark corridors like a jar-snouted
dame bear into the meagerness
of a fourth spring. we talk about
books he read six years ago, i am careful
about real sour cream. when he saved
his first nine-year-old and wore the
pale scent of her deciduous teeth to the dinner-table
i knew that there was little left
between us.
we both wait for trapped apples
which won't come until september,
but the blossoms are passing before us
like the whiteness of
struck does, and so
there is hope for their coming.