Possum Pouch

Black Stone 49

THAT MIDDAY SUN comes on full, a radiant field of white hot on the street and broken again by green shadows of neighbors' yards. Waylon's wakeful, looking across the room toward windows and out into that glowing space. He opens his lips. Gurgling noises announce a drooling regurgitation of breast milk. K sleeps and I steal these moments for my secret stone. Denton Welch relates how when walking through a wooded path his friend skewered a frog with the ferrule of his umbrella. They were terrified and shrieked, flinging the carcass. "But I saw that it was an old, dead frog," he said, "dry and hard as leather." Gruesome particulars haunt these placid surfaces. Poke at that internal cadaver, the one digging under my bones. The air opens and the sky changes and you become what you are by what goes down below. This internal geography looks like the physical world. In a little nook of a garden K and I went to look at an angel hidden behind leaves. He threw pebbles into a dense tangle of jasmine and palm leaves. We played in sticky air, minding our business tossing stones when he reached for his legs, swatting at something. Fire ants covered his shoes and red welts appeared on his bare legs. I moved him quickly from the hidden bed, brushing him. Removing his clothes the tiny ants crawled under my shirt. Now he naps. I loaf by a window between pages of a book and a notebook. The light fades in and out as the patterns of the sky change.