Subway
I knew he was not in the house, my Autistic son
whose presence is a heat, a warm breath blown
backwards through my mouth into me. I could feel
my breath in the empty air and disappearing and
I couldn’t feel him.
At the stops I am lost
the doors clanging open
I feel larger than I am
and wild and their eyes
take me in and I want
to be in my room where
the subway is a map
on my wall I see even
in my sleep. But when
the doors close I feel
the movement and
release. I am small.
I am part of the engine.
I am part of the man’s
eye looking into the
dark tunnel. I am
just a brightness.
I am made of sound
and blur.
After a week the police worried about finding him
a man in every train and still it was like he had
disappeared, and I knew he could. He could drift,
forget to be human and I would have to call him
back from indifferent eyes.
When I saw him again he was playing a video game
and I hugged him and he didn’t look at me or the men
who had saved his life. He stared at the screen like
it was a future. And I knew we were not enough.
We cannot carry him fast through the darkness, fast
so his mind unravels, fast so he forgets he is grounded
in the house that is green and fifth from the corner,
third street down from the Avenue, 26 miles from
the river, thousands of miles from the true sky,
the sky that lifts us up, the sky that makes us birds.
by Joseph Humphrey
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Poets, 2010