Dallas, September 1987

        1
The lost child in the farmer’s market
has not called his mother’s name once,
but charmed by tangerines and pomegranates
he lets the wrinkled elders in pickups
feed him and set him down to wander farther:
the fat senoritas tickle him;
the man with jalapeño seeds for teeth
breathes off the white of his eyes in one breath
with a worm at the bottom of his laugh.
At folding tables, the sunburned old women
shoo him away drunken with sugar,
white shirt stained with the spill of melons,
the dribble of strawberries
chewed from the knuckles of old men.
Half a block back by the radishes,
afraid to think, his mother
bruises her privacy on the hearing of strangers.
Vendors gaze up and keep emptying baskets
of ripe tomatoes into sacks
they mark with red Crayolas. The baby
clenched into the woman’s left side
kicks and bucks back.
                        Not once
has he called. A bald priest pats him,
hands swimming through souls
that sleepily waver aside; teenagers
casually dodging sideways bump him,
their pockets ripe with dope. He squeezes
green tomatoes and smells his fingers,
he heaves up cantaloupes to sniff the hard
pucker where their sweetness breathes,
he smooths his palm on the hips of pears
and drops grapes at the bare toes
of teenaged girls. One hisses at the burst
underfoot and snatches at his hair,
the little bastard. He dodges back scared
and upends a crate of grapefruits
that roll out stately and lopsided
across the convulsing sidewalk
and trip the tall man with the flat of eggs
and splatter the pavement with goddamns
and sizzle off the curb.
                        Out of sight,
the strained webbing of bushels of apples
presses his back, like the folding chair
when his mother sits outside
to watch him in the yard. Her name
forms on his mouth like a beesting,
but the tall man with flames of orange hair,
and orange beard, and one eye
green and brilliant behind the wire-
rimmed lens, one scarred
puckering socket, no shirt,
crawls in beside him under the table,
glowing with tattoos. His bushel hands
smell of egg white. He smiles
like corn on the cob. “Son of a bitch,”
he whispers. “You owe me
for every goddamned one
you made me drop. Come kiss your daddy.”

The Mexican behind the table grins
and keeps flicking the flies from the baskets,
touching the apples, pushing them forward
to shine, to be seen, but at the next booth
the black woman sitting cross-armed
above her pyramid of navel oranges
watches the boy’s head shake
and the long hand loosely encircling
his neck from behind. “So you don’t
remember me? Don’t you think I know you,
sugar boy? I had your name
burned in the flesh of my body. See that?
You can’t read that? Every letter
hot as the eyelids of Lucifer:
Novus Ordo Seclorum.
That’s your name in the old spelling.
And see this eagle with his wings
twisted like foil when you tear it off
and his talons like a drawer of knives?
He can see your house from here,
he can see that man you call your daddy
mowing he grass outside. That man
won’t pay me for those eggs: he’s thinking
of how to cut the long grass inder the hedge,
not about his boy. When I hold this knife
in front of you, you’ll be my son.
I want you to hear me cry out your name
when I blaze for twenty seconds
on the CBS news: I’m the messenger
of the father, the single-minded angel
of destruction, the seraph of the broken
covenant that even the king of New York City
can’t put together again.”
                        The lost boy
does not call his mother. Behind him,
the Mexican vendor’s eyes go glassy
at the steel. He scans the crowd for police,
thinking of his daughters in the village
who save all the money he sends
to come to America. He backs away
as people notice the red-haired man
holding the small unfrightened boy
who touches the socket of the missing eye,
traces with his thumb the tattooed curve
of the serpent at the apples of the ear.

        2
Under the soles of her sandals, the asphalt
bears back her weight, her knees tremble
like unfinished milk in the refrigerator door,
her thighs above them
huddle in the nights of ice cream
she spooned from the open carton in the freezer,
dreading an hour like this one.
Looking for change in her purse,
she’d let a dollar flutter loose
and had to stoop down (the baby
swung back on her left hip for balance)
and tenderly snatch between the shoes
that stamped at it on the gusty asphalt
and catch it onehanded, and she’d waved it
toward the bored girl raking her fingers
through the box of nickels, but when she’d
turned around to let her son
pick the best radishes,
                        he was lost,
crowded along the walk beside the tables
of stringbeans, peppers, grapes, the trucks
backed against curbs, tailgates open.
She’d called his name, expecting to catch him
leaping into focus
like the fish hidden leaf-shapped
in a picture of trees, but other children
kept dodging past her. One boy
almost bumped from her hand the money
she’d wanted to slice thin that night
with a thik think think of her knife
into the thick block, the parings
light as breath
into the dark bowl of greens.
                        Outer daylight
wavers at the market’s edge, the aura
of migraine. Under closed eyes, she discovers
slipping into mind a snapshot
two years old: his back to the camera,
his fat legs bowed beneath the Pamper,
one hand on the screen where He-Man
mastered the universe. Under her thumb,
she works the green weave of the dollar,
praying him back from the hardbound god
beneath her sewing kit.

        3
Hand half in the sack with a tangle
of green beans, a farmer whispers
“Jesus” and the customer turns, mouth
already covered with the hand that does not
clench her own child’s wrist; the lines

of staring trip and paralyze
whoever crosses them. Eye follows eye
to its focus where the knife’s hot tip
shines beneath the boy’s chin. All noise
under the tin roof recedes like rough sea
under speading oil.
                        In the silence,
every gourd hangs more cleanly
on its taut string, and the avocados
rise like pure pregnancies,
coolly having shed
bodies to be these mounded
instances of themselves in the green
absence of all sales but one.

A block away, like someone called,
she suddenly begins running. It is the hour
she kept herself from dreaming, the red
hour: her lost boy gazing
without recogniztion, the closest
grown man ducking beneath his truck
to hide from trouble, the one-eyed
killer consumed with apocalypse.
She cannot look away from the scars
of imploded socket and the mocking eye
that centers her life on its pinprick
of darkness. Slowly she feels the stare
behind the round lens of his spectacles
growing upon her – her flesh
still heavy from the last baby,
her hips a little big for these white shorts.
Her spine is a runnel of shame, her body’s
secrets tighten inward like snails.
The boy can smell the fruit no one
is buying. Grackles stride the asphalt.
And there is his mother, panting,
smoothing the air with her right hand.
He can see her pushing the wrinkles
from the silence, her face being still
as she gives away his sister
to a stout old black woman missing her teeth
and holds out her arms, like the slide
when she stands at the bottom.
He feels the man who holds him staring,
the slow smile shaking his back.

“You fresh out of eggs, too, sweetheart?”
Gripping the boy against his red chest
where the name in the thicket of hair
flares from his skin, the man
centers the gloss of a Golden Delicious
over the boy’s heart and slices it
suddenly in half with a keen flick
of blade into the ball of his thumb,
juice dripping from the boy’s buttons
onto his shorts. Cupping both halves
in his left hand, he carves
the core out neat and round
and fits the halves together – the stem
and the stiff knot of its base intact –
and holds it up squeezed whole
in his dragon-tongued fingers. “This,”
he says to the woman, “is your body.”

“This is your mama,” he told the boy.
“Jesus, look at that wet-dog stare of hers.
You should have seen her at seventeen,
when we’d meet in your grandmother’s garden.
There were figs as big as my broken eggs
up under those wide leaves
she teased me with. In August
they’d split, and bees would crowd on the ooze.
She’d come from the house with a joint
and stand there barefooted, blowing smoke
while they ate themselves drunk.
She’d catch the fig and squeeze off
a palm full of limp bees
and hold the split fruit on her tongue
with fresh bees swarming her lips
for the juice of it. She’d open her eyes
slow, holding the joint straight up
in her fingertips, hot as a stinger.”

“I don’t know you,” she whispered.
He turned the knife’s bright wetness
to play the glare of reflected daylight
in a shiver up her body and leave it
searing her eyes, the filament
of memory. She held her left hand up.

“Then the bitch forgot me. She gave her body
to a checkbook, she let a column of numbers
rock her sweet flesh. Sometimes
her flossed teeth grind and break in her jaw
when she kneels in the holy memory
of me. But she ices her bruises:
when she lies beside that little daddy
who rots in her bed with his molted feathers
mildewing in her pillow, she estimates
how much your life deducts
from how much she can spend. Her spirit
leaves her bed and haunts the house at night,
seeding your room with nightmares
as it whimpers its way downstairs
toward the leftovers in the kitchen:
if only there were fire of nuclear war,
she could at last redeem her life
and lose that dimpled fat from her upper thighs.”

        4
“I don’t know you at all,” she whispered,
Leaning toward him, confiding her ignorance
like someone in a dream of nakedness
calling her waking self to save her.

His left arm’s twisting dragon rose,
the right with the knife’s keen tip
squeezing the boy so tight he could not squirm.
The voice rose shrill and quavery,
the edge of its mockery bared.

“That day in 1969 I got your letter,
I looked up from the table in the mess hall
and saw the heat on the wet fields
wavering like old glass, but on the screen,
Armstrong soaked his feet in the cold moon.
All that day, I was drifting in space
with my eyes full of craters. Yesterday
ate tomorrow: the Eagle
fell toward the moon, I saw
your life before me in a vision –

you there, Aunt Jemima, throw me
one of those seedless things you sell
or I can’t prophecy.”

The black woman holding the baby
picked up an orange and hurled it at him
hard: he deftly caught it on the knife,
softening the give of his hand,
a soft clean thump to the hilt,
then the bright juice welled from its wound,
oozed onto his fist. His eye rolled back.

“I saw you cool into your thirties,
washing your B-complexes down
with a little liquor; you checked your balance
and found it good and said, ‘Let there be
fertilization,’ and your ovum floated out
at the acceptable time. The child
rose in one cell like the full moon’s
consecration. The day I saw
your letter, the eagle fell
out of starry night: the moon
was a hard silver egg, your womb
was the sucked-clean vacuum tube
where it rolled from the heavens
into this world: the boy’s
divine limbs were straining inside it.
All that night it trembled and rolled
in the nest you made it of declarations
and wrinkled bills and wadded newsprint.
I saw you hold it that morning
cold and silver against your breasts:
the early light shivered
in the bowl of water on the washstand
with no breeze stirring, and I stood up
in terror, my breath sucked out.”

He spread his arms above the boy
like Abraham at Moriah. A white-haired
woman in Levis turned her head aside
and pushed away the sight, her right hand
flaming with diamonds. The boy stood still.

“The room was full of the eagle whipping
spreadwinged like a flag in a stiff wind.
He struck the moon and the boy rolled from it
screaming, the fissure of his eyelids
molten steel. Your bent body
dripped milk and blood on the shining
down of his infancy. With one eye,
I saw the ten horns of his godhead,
the amber and purple spendor; with the other,
a redfaced, squalling boy.
                        The eagle
plucked out my holy eye with a talon of shrapnel
and put its picture on the dollar’s back
at the top of the tomb of the godhead
and wrote the boy’s name under it.
But the eye itself he hid from me everywhere,
in ripe figs and the pits of peaches
and eggyolks in the dark heat
under the hen, in the seeds of apples
where whole orchards wait like the armed men
crouched in the teeth of the dragon, in the lyre-
shape of woman, the unmastered instrument
of all increase. There it is bedded, blind
until the day some woman gives it back.”

Above the tattooed arm, the boy’s face
gazed without fear at the far edges
of sunlight beyond the block-long
shade of tin, the wavering heat
behind his mother’s criming anguish.
Dry-mouthed, she stood in her shame
with her eyes on her son, who did not
name her, who did not look at her.

“What do you want?” she cried.
The old black woman, weeping,
swung the baby to one side
and lifted her loose blouse, the breast
falling slack and wrinkled into sight.
“You ain’t forgot your mama, son,”
she shouted, “and what she done for you.
What you want from this lady here?”
The tall man laughed like the wind in husks.
No guns of policemen hung ready,
no TV cameras whirred, no reporter
shook his microphone like hyssop.

“That,” he said. “That dollar.”

        5
She looked down startled at the wadded
dollar in her hand. She took it to him slowly.
The apple’s halves fell open in his hand.
He threw the orange skidding from the knife
and with tattooed fingers loose around the hilt
folded the soft bill and put it in the core,
where the eye in the pyramid shone
from its white socket. He closed the fruit.

“I see your fear. Your soul turns brown
with the small raked toothmarks of children
breaking its skin. You disease this boy –
you know it, you dread the way your evil
settles in his nights like the sludge of chocolate
at the bottom of the glass no one
has stirred, but already the electric gut
and the hips like a downed wire writhing
and the ecstatic dung desire him.
Listen, bitch, you couldn’t pay me
a fraction of what those eggs he broke
were worth, every yolk of them
like a broker’s eye golden with futures.
This boy is my boy. I claim this boy.”

He spoke with the boy before him,
the knife rising straight as a candle flame
before the boy’s face. His left hand
gripped the hot air convulsively.

“All your symbols have had abortions
to keep their navels lovely;
they won’t carry meanings to term.
But history is furled behind my blindness
in all its scrolls, and whatever the angels
shuddered with paralyzed beauty
above the cities of America
never utter, dazed
in the static of airtime,
speaks from my flesh. Their day is coming
suddenly, their waking into fire,
the ripping loose of the great wings.
You see the truth with my eye:
they send me ahead of them with the one word
of Blood.”
                        He squeezed the boy’s thumb
ripe and split it with the blade, a crimson
welling he lifted and pressed into the gaze
of his empty socket. Then her name broke
from the boy’s throat, the child jerked away
his hand, stumbling backward from the shove
the tall man gave him, the mother’s
shriek beating upward under the tin roof.

        6
The distant vendors watched the yellowjackets
stir among the dropped fruit along the walks;
flies lifted and settled on the baskets
sitting unbought in the long hiatus
of selling. With dark faces the men
left their goods and walked back
to spit past their trucks into sunlight
and stare at the skyline.
                        O God, they prayed,
Whose eye shines above the thirteenth
course of stones in the pyramid of the dollar,
have mercy on the children in our houses.
Send your angel down across these multitudes
like hot dry wind and parching heat.
make their hearts as dry as your inner mummy
of unquenchable dust, and let them throng again
to our sweet fruit.
                        Slowly, with murmurs,
the knit shirts and running shoes
turned aside from the wounded child.
The black woman hugged the baby
and wept, but no one among them
met the eye of the mother who screamed
with furious pointing at the running man
bursting into sunlight at the edge of the market,
dodging among the parked cars, the dollar
streaming from his upraised hand like a flame
swept back from a torch. The lost boy
could not hug tight enough his mother’s legs.
On her pale thighs his thumb left imprints
of bitten strawberries, perfect cherries, plums.