The Boy
A poem inspired by the pandemic, and my mild obsession with foxes
I started writing this poem in early May and finished it in late September.
The first stanza popped into my head one day in May, as I was walking home from my nearly-daily spring ritual of looking for scallop shells on the harbor beach in Provincetown. Shell hunting was a habit I got into during the first couple of months of the pandemic, when so much was uncertain.
I felt lucky to have a home to come to in a place that was not only beautiful, but also was not overrun with infections and death. I had been in NYC for work from January through mid-March; the night before I left I watched EMTs in hazmat suits carry a body on a stretcher out of an apartment on my block.
The rest of the poem came to me in the ensuing months.
The second stanza I wrote in my head as I was meditating in July. One of my candles burned out, and I started thinking of the lines about the boy and scallop shells. So I connected them together.
The final stanza I worked on more intentionally; I wanted to end in a way that felt like an escape as well as a victory over a threat. I wasn’t sure where the boy would escape to — or who or what he’d triumph over — but uncertainty seems appropriate given All The Things.
I like the ambiguity in the piece about the role the narrator (i.e., me) plays in it. In one sense I’m the boy, but in another I’m watching a scene — that I’m not part of — unfold.
The Boy
The boy who chases broken
scallop shells is in my head.
He’s living at the end of the world
wondering why he’s not dead.
The candles on my altar burn out
when he runs from my mind.
I wait in the dark, surrounded
by hummingbirds gone blind.
They tap my empty ears for nectar
and say he will never return.
So I fly away over hungry foxes
who wait for food not earned.
September 29, 2020
