He takes breakfast late on Sundays, alone.
It is the end of summer, the summer in which
the absence of pain stopped being a surprise
and instead the arrival of pain became surprising.
He eats in the front room so assonant with sun.
Fried eggs, French toast and burnt bacon, coffee
taken with no sugar but heavy cream. Out
the big window the trees are florid and
beginning to burn. He had loved autumn,
it was the season of his birth. The trees
sew their shadows in delicate cobwebs
across the hardwood. And perhaps it is
their gesticulating reflections - thrown by
the coquettish wind - that makes him lift his
eyes. Or perhaps it is a faint, ghostly trail
of rose scent. Or perhaps it is some intrinsic
whisper, a young boy‘s fingers smudging
fake ivory with their meanderings.
He raises his head and looks across
the room, over the wending web of shadows
and the wide ocean of sunny pine. What stops
him and drops his wide, soft frame to its knees
are three small trapezoids of floor
that have not been blanched by sun.
The invisible legs of a piano, the invisible
swinging legs of a boy too short to reach the floor.