We had an actual rocking-couch
that my brother and I fought over:
I would swing myself in a poverty
of balance into cautious sleep.

There was a song my mother would sing
about me being her sunshine… the tune was sung
there in that room.
Her woven shirt was blue
as the clotted scent of the air between seasons,
drained and dropped like a morning.

It was spring. Someone made tomato soup
and peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches…
My father would call me to the table
in a clatter of plates, silverware – the thin sound
of glasses filling… and the sofa, miserable,
would rock furiously in the first moments of my absence.

This is where the boy gets lost–
in the time it takes to leave the rocking-couch
and come to the table, loss like a boy
misplacing his shoe in a mix of wooden blocks or
wedged underneath the root of some chair…
Loss like the movement of that dumb sofa and its memory
of the little boy’s body.