Joel Friederich
BOY LOST AT A FESTIVAL
After you’d been returned to me
clutching an old man’s sleeves,
(a man holding goldfish in his hands)
after you’d emerged from sinuous
enclosing crowds, from stalls
selling luck, posters of pop stars’
cleavage, steaming cups of shochu
that squinched the puffy eyes of drunks—
after I could see you again and breathe,
I grasped for where you might have been
during those minutes your sticky hand
had slipped free of mine.
Maybe you visited the god sulking
in his closet of moths, lifted persimmons
from his dry lap, sipped rice wine
souring in his cup since the last century.
Your fingers might have traced the fine dust
of his cheek, the grooves gouged
in the block of yew he was hewn from,
might have slid around the whorls of his ears,
their endless entrances to silence.
Maybe you found a hatch at the base
of his spine and crawled in:
Why not? That imagined world was yours.
If you’d called out then
I might have heard your voice
lost in the gorges of a god’s mind,
echoing in my own heart’s crumbling altar.
Outside, the neighborhood men had begun
their chant—koi, koi, koi-ya-kai—
and lifted the whole shrine, you
and the local god you’d inhabited, tilting
and rocking above the street—
koi ya!
When they carried you into the Pacific
and the sea began to climb around their knees,
there was nothing I could have done
to reclaim a boy returning to the body
that had borne him, but just then
the old man whose name I never learned
led you back to me from the crowd.
