The Larcenist’s Son

Let me tell you how
things are with me. When I
went to San Francisco to get

my passport, I spent so much
money on a business suite with
a view of nothing, and on

room service. That’s the
kind of secret that stays
a secret because no one else

was there. My impudence,
the Four Season’s lobby bar,
a haircut, face face. Is there

really beauty in being broken?
My friend spent a weekend
distressing her new wooden chairs,

and a whole month alarming the hell
out of her lamps! You could have
stolen away with Mrs. Dobens’

money. Cocaine or some other
designer waste. But, how did it
occur to you to try and live

with that crime— milk, eggs,
walk-a-thon pledges, movie tickets
for the whole family?

**

Finally complicit with the dread
you’d always been fighting off.
There must be peace in that

complicity. Later, I found you
almost by accident at an intersection,
with an oily blue duffel—

you became a story I told—
the soundproof wallboard dissolving
into the church hallways. Across

from a few greasy drunks, my sober
father. A mine shaft to a familiar
life. In a story I read, a man

lying at night next to his girlfriend
had always felt he was cheating
on her, duping her, but he’d

chalked it up to some childhood
lesson, some biological stir.
And then, calmly he slept with

another woman, and suddenly,
the sense became less pernicious.
He had understood, but he’d had to

conflate desire & assuage. In the midst
of finding you and seeing that you were
housed and fed, your medical needs attended to,

I’d joke with my mother in her sun-cleaned
kitchen that you clearly weren’t going to teach me
to be a responsible man by example, but by necessity,

and she’d laugh and hand me a peeled section
of a tangerine her husband had picked from
a tree in his mother’s yard, she’d tell me

she didn’t like my beard because
it hid my face, and the wet look
from the tangerine would stay on her mouth.