Lorena Axman Freed

For Jacob In Memoriam
 
Last night I had that dream again, the one 
where nothing's ever new:
				Under the sun
     the radio crackles up with old songs flyting
     in fog-white noise. Noisy in fog, the pother
     of crashed waves clashes round us louder, whiting
     us out of hearing music or each other.
     He's never swum. This is Jake's first Pacific
     Ocean and time beyond the Midwest. So
     I snap that photo of his gasp at riffles
     rapping salt-sharp and icy at his toe
     in which fog seems to pour into his throat.
     And then as he pretends to be a boat
     fog blazes on him like a sunlit reaper.
     Spray rips my squeal away as he runs deeper
     into the tide. Sunbeams on him one more
     time burn like lighthouses to warn of shore.

The softest stuff can snap the evening's bones.
Here from the window I watch leaves on stones
of the dry garden swirl amid the mumble
of distant blueback thunders as they scumble
the sky until, like clear and sudden blood, 
rain on the yard here turns firm ground to mud.
Now far away from all those nights too cursed
for any sleep, when memories rehearsed
their prosecutions, when imponderable
God was a sadist jouncing through the skull,
far from when water quenched like gulps of sand
out of a cup sloshed in my shaken hand
scarred fresh with guilt and the exacto knife,
tonight is breathing water into life
with wonder and lightning as I feel the pane
cold underneath my palm and stare in sane
silence through the unpeopled rush of rain,
lightless save where a traffic signal sputters
color at carless roads with flooding gutters
or streetlamps with a sodium-vapor glare
burnish the splashdown capering in the air
like fog fluorescent on an empty face.
I do not think I am prepared for grace.
They say that being like this is hard. They mean
not easy. But it's soft, a velveteen
coat gently, quietly worn to warm the heaving
shoulders like memories of my boy breathing.

Slumber my son upon the palms of ocean,
your carbon chumbled in its jaws of motion,
yet cupped like so much river, as the sea's
step-son, as if your soul in matrices
of water hatched and brushed away the salt
from wilting eyelids finally to vault
to no body's somebody in no language.
It is a wonder that will never vanish
before me, to believe the everlasting
way of all selves is to be remade, casting
themselves together in worlds unsurpassed.
Except, of course, that nothing real can last.

Lorena Axman Freed may have been born in the 80s. Sometimes she is a woman living in Ohio who enjoys gardening and paintball. Sometimes she just wonders whether she has really been anyone anywhere at all. She is still figuring that out. Questions of self vex her. But enough about her. What about you?