The Wild Boy of Aveyron

         (Paris, 1801)

I named him Victor to vanquish the animal in him.
I tried to teach him to name his own needs,
to have his words rise up from the core
of his body, ball up in his throat, then push out
in well formed vowels quelling the inarticulate.

But all he could gargle out was the word lait
as if somewhere between tongue and throat
the muscles that made his words had lost their way.

Lait became his insistent call for love
and the angry expression to all the words
neither my little briberies of milk nor
my punitions could ever make him say.

Later, I tired and returned to Paris,
but sometimes, in the dark non sequitur
of night, when dreams should take me away,
Victor comes and shakes me. I watch him
press his nose against the window,
confused by its impenetrable glass,

and I see the moon’s milk-glow fracture
down upon his face and the hills, caged
between the mullions, huddling outside.

Then grinning with a feral joy, he pulls
again at my sleeve saying his one word
over and over, until he turns back, and tilting
his head up, he opens his mouth wide and waits
for the moon to pour in…and I fall asleep.

****

The Beautiful Woman

You stare at the jagged tic-tac-toe of her scars
where once a downy peach fuzz grew, and you
    realize
how beauty is an emotion from which desire
    splurges
like a prodigal. How it often burgeons, a sudden
    flower
from a dark and unexpected place where you
    believed
nothing grew.

                   But here…now…the livid white knots
of her skin seem to muscle into purple before your
    eyes
all of that past pain which, to you, is only the
    discomfort
of what you see and the embarrassment of being
    caught
as you imagine the indignities she suffered for
    each mark.