Old Salt Horn

I wonder if you have grey hairs, boy? It is so improper of me to call you a boy that it makes me smile, wide and pleased, like I used to when I fell asleep under the sun with bees bumping along the inside of the window. Even then, I never called you boy. When I wrote, I pulled from you a child, an adolescent, and the closest--a paper man. These things were all you; but you were none.

I wonder if you still cut your head off every season like a sheep? I remember how it moved--like a very careful ornament, each part and joint moving independent of the skull when you shook.

I wonder if you still fidget? This strikes me as a youthful thing. Are you still youthful? How far have your smile lines stretched?

You moved as if your bones had been replaced by bamboo shoots.

Have you bitten anyone yet? I'd always wondered if you had. There were signs...no, just the one. And it looked like whatever it was bit back. Paper beats rock, kid, but scissors chip rock. How much smaller you get at this distance. But it's all perspective. If that distance were halved and then halved again, I'd jolt, as I once did, at the sight of your stature. You are a shaggy colossus with spirits for eyes.

Do you still allow yourself to be distractions when you walk? I hope so. I hope so. I still think about this. It makes me wonder and twist and wonder some more. Surely not..? I will never know the answer; the question is unaskable. And so between us is this secret: the unanswered, unasked answer. Yours may be different from the one I have sketched out, and yet...the secret we share is the same. Not shared, really--neither of us owns it; it owns us.

The shape of your back is the first I've remembered. Reminded me of an animal that is either loping or stretching--a strange, strange bird with a snout. An alien, maybe. I've known some aliens in my time.

I wonder if you lean as far back when you walk as you used to--as if something between you and your shadow was lifting your lazy bones along.

And, of course, I wonder what you'd think of what I've made today; I wonder how earnestly that urging was. Well wishing or...or did you really believe I could, should, and would shake shit up? I don't know if I believe this. But sometimes I do. And some of those times, just for your sake. And I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing.