Author's Reading (requires RealPlayer)

The game is over. But something remains
Of the late-fifties summer, a radio's traces
Of "Moulin Rouge" leaving room for greater silence,
Suddenly stiller air: "Whenever we meet,
I worry and wonder: You're close to me now,
But where is your heart?"
                                          A whacked ping-pong ball
Whizzes past the table's border, alights
On one rare current, hovers, dips, and bounces
Away and up the pavement into the woods,
And a boy, the game winner, takes off after it
Up a slight rise, arriving where it lands
Slightly late. Nested there, amid the slowly burning
Jagged leaves, the ball begins to brighten--
And the boy hears the faintest sound, like laughter
From inside a moon. His heart hasn't yet slowed down.
The heat of the day and the haze suffuse one gaze
That takes the upward sweep of shrub and the gravel
Sliding away below, and in no time,
Hand over hand up through the stinging bark,
He rises over bungalows, sighting
From a mountain ledge a silhouetted crown
Before a sharp-edged coin of sun. The game
Is over; the other boys have gone.
                                          Is it now
The first shiver starts, with no one near
To spot a stranded body through the brush?
When does the bright panic begin? Does it come
Shimmering with the faded scrap of song,
The verse resuming through the static, as if
No time had passed? "It's always like this,
The spell that I'm under: Your lips may be near,
But where is your heart?" For his foot on the ledge
Holds half of nothing, and his head holds nothing
But a spell. The terror of never coming down
Comes hard upon him, a sudden bug
Clinging to the bitter mound a glacier cut
Terrible aeons ago.
                                            Oh teenage muse,
Counselor, older sister, step up lightly
Toward his aerie, where he shudders like a rigid
Little bird! Lift away the heaviness
Of unending afternoon with all the grace
Of loving homily: Tell him that one foot
May follow another, in the descent
As well as in the rise; say that the mother
Who tells you never to go up to the place
From which you never can return, though harsh
Is not completely wrong; say all that, but
Tell him he will come down. For the decade
Has long since sealed the terror of that summer.
The day and the song will slide down from the hill.
He will slowly make his way from there to here.