My Brother the Artist, at Seven

As a boy he played alone among the bougainvillea

overhanging the brick-and-cement walls of cloistered

gardens, the neon-bright houses sprouting a lazy oval

around the dusty playground. Neighborhood dogs

knew him; he said hello to them solemnly, in languages

made up and familiar, noting each one’s responding

doggy smirk to his small hand outstretched to them,

singing to himself. The first and only grandchild,

adored, gilded, the world was always his. How could

it not? Long legged as a waterbird he spirits himself

out of the house before dawn, the damp air just

beginning to wake to summer. He pretends that

the ether and everything under it is made of words,

that the invocation of each in his fluted voice is what

stains the petals of magenta nine o’clock flowers, lifts

the sun along some hidden axis, makes the ice-blue

dragonflies buzz through air thickening like honey.

Pulchritude, incandescent, fecund, ichor, rapscallion,

elation, stelliferous, he repeats the words to himself,

remembering the shape of mouth and tongue as they

anchor each one to what he conjures: stars in daylight,

spiders stalking sky, tigers laughing at their reflections,

birds growing wings of sunlight. The earth is his alone.

When he hears his name called, he falls silent, rigid against

the slender trunk of a tree cotton, white silk spilling out

of the boll clutched in his hand. In the undergrowth he

spies the young hawk, tremulous, yellow eyes unblinking,

assessing, dangerous. The noise of morning falls away as

he mirrors its gaze, quiet, small hand suspended midair,

motionless as a cat stalking its prey, an old language

taking new form: fugitive, fierce, empyreal.