In June of 1988, Will's last
Half day of Middle School came to an end.
Released into the bath-warm noon, he walked
Across the road to where his house sat waiting.
He felt the Summer's gentle oil soak
His neck and arms. He breathed and felt his nerves
Buzz, tingling from the pollen-clotted breeze.
The dog-wood in his yard that time of year
Was decked with liquid-paper colored bijoux,
Each swaying blossom blushing at its core.
And as he stood before that flock of flowers,
Roosting on his favorite climbing tree,
He felt how tightly the sidewalk's plates, poured square
Around his shoes, constrained his whims and motions.
A mute ventriloquism echoed in the sky
And made him feel he was called up
To splash the pathless clouds.

One hundred times
His mom had scolded not to climb the tree --
More to protect the dog-wood's elegant
Black limbs than his peach-colored pudgy ones.
But mother's constant vetoes pricked like goads
And, summer-drenched, he felt the need to try.
Will ducked beneath the tent of quilted petals
Into the inner shade that cooled the trunk
And hoisted himself up, his loafers scrambling,
His chinos streaked with bruise-hued sap and bark.
A little monkey, he wrangled up too high
And perched like Icarus upon a branch
That let him feel the sun. He was thirteen.
High-school would soon begin on his next birthday,
September fifth, but that was far away.
There was a summer's life-time to be free.
Much closer was the ground, as Will found out,
When his dear tree betrayed him to the hands
Of gravity, which dragged him off the branch
With a harsh crack he can't remember now
Onto the root-nobbed earth to bleed among
Last Autumn's worm-munched leaves.He broke a rib.
A spider-web of fractures filled his leg
And a slight concussion jangled in his head
Like a six-year-old's untuned piano lesson.
He missed the eight-grade dance and moped for weeks.
But as the ringing faded from his ears,
Elan returned, and soon he found a Summer
Hobby suited to his plaster bonds.

Their tenant Karen recently had married
And moved out. All through that Spring her fiance
Would stay the night, the budding lovers cheering
The third-floor with their hushed moans. Will could
Hear them by cracking open the attic door
With care so's not to quench their passion in a creak.
Next day the sun would rise above the trees
And slide refracted through the shower-sprinkled
Window of Karen's bathroom on the second
Floor to find the lovers' bodies clung
With foam. But peeping through the key-hole,
All Will's eye could cull was steam. Still that crazed white
Could charge his heart with jitters all day long
By thinking of the things he had not seen.

When Karen left, a lovely ghost remained
Of small past pleasures magnified into
Vignettes, the images he'd really seen --
A figure flitting through the hall her robe's
Frayed satin collar faded rose against
Her olive throat, her hennaed hair dyed flax
And a bouquet of Oil of Olay and soap --
Were decorated with a naughty lace
Of fancies cooked up between cartoons and soup
As he lay paralytic in his bed.
As time passed on, Will's pass-time passed him to
A plain obsession. Sore, he'd hobble up
The crooked stair, his gesso-coated leg
Half statue, powdering the varnished boards
With flakes of plaster as he troubled the air
With cries of pain each time his clumsy crutches,
Criss-crossing, failed to spare his throbbing leg.
But it was worth some pain to thrill his boredom
And lie on the nude mattress where they'd lain.
He found some tattered things she'd left behind --
The beads of a split rosary whose string
Had frayed made thin by many years of prayer,
A pair of lilac cotton panties torn
And hiding in the corner of an old
Dark dresser-drawer, and a blue phone whose numbers
Had rubbed away and left a jumbled cast
Of characters still fading at each touch.

The phone, behind its eerie monogram,
Was odd and had a spooky dial-tone
Despite that Karen must have turned it off.
Will spent a week of stolen afternoons
Surrounded by these salvaged objects used
To decorate coarse puppet-shows with glimpses
Pilfered from another's life and love.
But then one day the phone stopped his heart cold
By ringing with its cool electric giggle,
A sound he'd never heard until that day.
He crashed across the room and picked it up
On the third ring. Hello, he said, Hello,
Hello, Hello, he held his breath. Hello.
A wonderful mistake must have been made,
For Will could hear two voices on the phone.
Two women talking while he heard it all
Invisible, he felt as though his spine
Was carbonated with a sparkling tonic.
He listened to a maple-syrup drawl
Complain about how much her dentist hurt
And gossip that she thought the boss was queer.
A high-pitched Myrna shrieked and, then, rejoined
It couldn't be because she'd seen him kiss
Racquel behind the ear at the staff picnic.
They then began to guess what would be served
And if the fire-works would dazzle them that year.
Will tried to make his way onto the bed,
But his crutches changed the spiral cord (which latched
Into the wall and then into the crossed
Ramshackled circuits of AT & T)
Into a snare which yanked the phone right out
>From under him.

Its clatter petrified the ladies.
Just as a gun-shot on a city night
Will make a room of talk grind to a hush,
Will's clumsy spying gagged their chat with fear.
Then, in their nervous silence and the thin
Conjectures they both made (some sort of static
Or, one said, her molasses-coated throat gone cold,
Perhaps a burglar was there down-stairs.
But where? Call the police, but to which house?),
Will saw himself as in a fun-house glass.
As he sat listening to them wrestle panic,
He felt an echo that was nothing like the sky,
And looking past the lilac triangle
Splayed on the bed and through the window out
Into his yard, Will saw the punch-red sun
Had made the wounded dogwood seem to bleed.
He pulled the phone out of the wall and sat.
His leg was pounding, but he didn't care.

Will's cast was cut away a few weeks later.
His leg was icing-white; the cast's white side
Was marked with two sad black tattoos, his mom's
Sharp floral signature, and her boyfriend's
Brute, chunky scrawl. Will spent all August reading.
But when his birthday came, he went to school.
Now more alone, but ready to make friends.