The Call

Two blocks from where the order beds at Kew
account for our vegetable beginnings,
underneath the garden’s 200-foot wooden flagpole,
pillar of dark in the dark
that crossed Nova Scotia stretched
between two logging trucks,
that nearly sank the ship it came on,
symbol of friendship between countries
that took the whole British army corps of engineers’
minds and bodies to hoist
so it could sport the flag on royal birthdays,

you sit in the flat we shared, its dark screenless windows
admitting the whole biting army of the invisible you have
to drop the phone every now and then to slap.

Sadness is your concert pitch, your A,
your affect, your affliction, your
abandoned form in its cave keeping warm
by the glow of figures on a screen

while the flagpole listens on into the dark,
poised against the shoulder of the bass violist
sleeping in his night-colored tux,
listens to the stirrings of the tousled flowers
resting from being looked at, waiting
for the virtuoso gardeners
to walk through the gate,
take up their gleaming hoes and rakes—

Everything in place like a birthday
the child awakens to too early,
the streamers still coiled in their coils,
the candles melting into one big year
in their flimsy box as dawn strikes them—

Everything that should be about the child
not about him yet,
maybe too late to ever be about him
now that he’s glimpsed
magic’s accoutrements, is that what

our talking about it
across the ocean, our bodies shrunk
to sound waves in a thick black cord
has done?

All winter long, when I was there to listen,
you read to me about Victor "the wild child"
and Jeanie, his wild sister in our century.
You made a study—their grunts, their lingering reliance
on all fours, their seemingly merciful
saviors and teachers who,
when celebrity cooled and government money
dried up at the frayed edge of their progress,
abandoned them to science, or silence.

Still, whether language is innate
obsessed you. How late in a life,
how far along, loping in the jungle or
tied to a potty chair in a silent room is too late
to learn the names of things,
to mix those sounds with other sounds
so what one desires can be asked for,
and someone of your same species might say, as I say,

yes. You in your temporary hermitage, yes.
You who grew up roaming open country
without rules or siblings, yes. You
whose language is an alien-sounding
brook I love, when I say Please bring home
a book of British names

I don’t mean flowers’ names, Latinate or common,
green or garish, clipped or shaped, shipped back
to the kingdom to be strolled through, studied,
trained to sprawl or articulate up lattices, one sample
of each—

I mean the name of our wildest idea,
the one we won’t abandon
though oceans and trees don’t need it,
though music goes on without it,
though others of our kind seem to mock it
in their attempts to outnumber flowers—

These weeks apart,
you seem to have drifted
back beyond wild to the wild,
but I still carry him in my strong mind
through fields of flowers,
as you will carry him in your strong arms
through fields of flowers,

and bring him here and tell him
how the idea of him (or is it a her?)
arose like a rose and found a way
to speak to us—never too late—near flowers.

Robin Behn