He Longed To See a Fox

First red friend came in a blue hood, covered a white head, bump. Gave you Emily Dickinson on an index card. When you went to the Louvre you sprinted past the Mona Lisa, all the shreds of tourists, it was swinging from a rope.

Museum

Now you walk through the plastic heart, its pink walls shrunk around you. You see the bodies, the warm rooms packed with doctors and crowded families — this is how an ear works, this is how a hand. There is a muscle man, muscles stretched exploding to prove a point. There is a heart attack mid process. The families clutch their sides. A whole horse bucks its rider, its hide thrown off in the corner — like a fur coat says the woman to her husband — on display. You gape at the boy with tattooed skin shriveled, I love Christy still in tact. The blood vessels hover mid-air. The eight-month ball of a fetus nestles in its mother’s gut while the girl in the stroller points — mummy, isn’t she cute? — and asks to take it home.

Extinguish

There are no wolves here

But they can wander, you knew and in your red dreams wolves filled the yard. They came on all their horses, came in velvet round the bend, the dark grass thick with hooves. Then your uncle came in his slippers and the house was a castle, all staircase, no prowling for weeks.

Thanksgiving

Older, the uncle takes shape

He comes from the mainline, brings salmon on crackers, kisses your mother near the fridge. You put on stockings. The ancestor with her collar on looks out. Your mother invites her red friends and they come on in, the dining room filling with platters, with say what makes you thankful, the dining room fills with clinks. Afterwards you gather on the red couch, watch Thoth. The man in a loin cloth sings in central park, spins in his own brown body until Why doesn’t he get a job? asks the uncle. Red wine spills from the glass.

Scratch

Once in the mirror you watched Bridgette trying on clothes. Later you had your mother explain the scratches. Van Gogh drew women, dark hatches for elbows, knees. To know how it feels to be created. He colored the legs of chairs. When you scratch your babysitter, the babysitter slips behind the white door. You peer through the slit to catch a grown woman cry.

Flashlights

You and your brothers find lovers in flashlights on the beach. In the day you eat hot dogs in baskets while the parents laugh, fingers under napkins, to explain. All the grown-ups laugh.

I’ve Had It

Your father roars at the table, slaps it in the skin. Something your brother said maybe, while your mother squirms to gather up laughs. You think of that photograph: your brother in red boots running at the top of his lungs. There is one of your father, identical, screaming from his tricycle, on the stairs.

Farthest from The Kitchen Your Father Has a Room

Banjos, bicycles, bones on the wall. Computer screen is lit for latest project, steam engines litter the ground. That morning you were driving, playing Pirates of Penzance and he told you how he loved it, how he sang it all night from his bedroom when he was your age, in the dark. You could see it — the way he must have looked out the window, boy unaware of own loneliness, while the others played rock and roll. At dinner he wants to talk about ideas. When you first go to college you take one of his photographs — lone tree melting in a field — you hang it.

First Loves Should Have Horns

You escape to your bedroom: here the still canopy, here the open closet, here the white windowsill where you write and have green dreams, dark branches clawing the glass. When the boy comes you put him in the guest room — all the animals watch.