Gabriel (2 page)

Curators paused to watch him run

With so much energy he was like a wound top

He could almost fly a kite when there was no wind

In those days we did not have leashes

Or ropes for our children in airports

We skipped along behind them

No runway or landing pad

No nursery or laboratory

No public or private school

Would ever be able to hold him

It was like giving a tropical storm

Some time out on land

It was as if a TV show ran constantly

In his mind the innocent kid

Kept breaking out of prison

He was a little Bartleby

Of the nursery he despised kindergarten

And preferred not to

He clung to the couch he held fast

To the chair we dragged him out

Of the closet kicking and screaming

For an after-school ritual he rushed around

The house turning over furniture

And throwing books at the wall

He pushed over a lamp and tossed pillows

Through the door he nearly broke down

He kicked out the window twice

He had a fit on the front lawn

In the driveway in a friend’s house

He locked himself in the bathroom

He started yelling at the referee

And stomped off the field in a fury

It was a bad call

He wanted he needed to buy something

Every day a new video system an iguana

A baseball bat a football helmet

He wanted he needed to go right away

To the arcade in the Galleria

Where you won tokens that brought rewards

Someone told us he had King’s Syndrome

He thought he was royalty

And everyone should treat him like a king

We understood the desperation of the therapist

Who locked the door and sat on him

When he tried to leave the room

The sun is tired

And so I’m hoisting him up

And carrying him on my shoulders

Over the hill or through the park

Around the pond back to the car

Home from the ballgame

He’s scrambling up my back

His bare legs tightening

Around my neck

I’m grasping his ankles

Giving him a seat in the grandstands

Just above my head

The sun wants to see

The stage over the crowd

And look down upon the world

He’s bounding onto my shoulders

In the swimming pool

And diving off

I can still feel his slippery feet

Why is he so scalding

Hot on my shoulders

I’m lifting him over my back

And striding through the woods

Like a tree walking with an orb

Branching out of its trunk

He’s perched atop my ladder

At the fireworks display

But he’s restless

And wants to bolt

I didn’t come here to watch the fireworks

I remember the five-year-old collector

Who started with four samurai slammers

Teens with attitude

He liked the way ordinary kids

Morphed into Rangers and piloted Zords

Deprogrammed from the dark side

I remember the boy who needed Beanie Babies

And then graduated to Transformers

Comic books and anime cards

Magic cards we called
cardboard crack

I remember the collector who liked the hit

Of buying or selling it didn’t matter what

He sold lemonade and cookies

And handmade paintings

Hastily brushed

Which he hawked for a dollar apiece

In front of the Menil Collection

Across the street from our house

Maybe someday little boy

Your work will be hanging

Inside the museum
visitors said

While the artist just smiled

And nodded

And took their money

I remember the boy who never cared

What he bought or sold after he bought

Or sold it it’s all over now

He loved cartoons where nothing is final

Everyone gets flattened and then gets up

And starts running around again

He did not like to remember

His tics were always worse

When it was hot

He did not like to remember

Wiping his face like a third-base coach

Giving signals to the batter

He did not like to remember

Days of obsessive eye blinking

Nights of touching his hair

For a while he developed

A heavy sniff almost a snort

People moved away from us in theaters

He did not like to remember

His tantrums at school after school

They did not get along

He did not like to remember

Teachers and therapists

Tests he did not want to take

He did not like to remember

Drugs that made him lazy and fat

They overmedicate kids now

He told anyone who would listen

He’d rather buy a stogie

Drink a beer smoke a joint

He did not like to remember

His diagnosis for Tourette syndrome

Or pervasive developmental disorder

Not otherwise specified

He knew something was wrong

He did not like to remember

The population of his feelings

Could not be governed

By the authorities

He had reasons why

Reason disobeyed him

And voted him out of office

Anxiety

His constant companion

Made it difficult to rest

Unruly party of one

Forget about truces or compromises

The barricades will be stormed

Every day was an emergency

Every day called for another emergency

Meeting of the cabinet

In his country

There were scenes

Of spectacular carnage

Hurricanes welcomed him

He adored typhoons and tornadoes

Furies unleashed

Houses lifted up

And carried to the sea

Uncontained uncontainable

Unbolt the doors

Fling open the gates

Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods

He was trouble

But he was our trouble

Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything

For his art he dedicated himself

To the Great Work

I admired his single-mindedness

All through my twenties

I argued his case

Now I think he was a jerk

For skipping his daughter’s wedding

For fear of losing his focus

He believed in the ancient enmity

Between daily life and the highest work

Or Ruth and the
Duino Elegies

It is probably a middle-class prejudice

Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova

Should have raised her son Lev

Instead of dumping him on her husband’s mom

Motherhood is a bright torture
she confessed

I was not worthy of it

Lev never considered it sufficient

For her to stand outside his prison

Month after month clutching packages

And composing
Requiem
for the masses

I argued with Rilke and Akhmatova

All the years I shuttled Gabriel to school

And then locked down with their poems

I argued with them while I scribbled away

In the pizza joints and video arcades

It is a true error to marry with poets

John Berryman concluded

Or to be by them

He’s singing the Poe Elementary School blues

He’s singing the Shlenker School blues a day school

For the offspring of upper-middle-class strivers

He’s singing the Montessori School blues

He’s singing the Monarch School blues

For kids with executive function disorders

I give you the educational consultant blues

One lived in San Antonio one in Idaho

He’s singing the Little Keswick blues

A therapeutic boarding school in central Virginia

Where many drive up and say it feels like home

It did not feel like home to us

He’s singing the Devereux Glenholme blues

Where they searched boys for contraband

And treated chewing gum like shooting heroin

He’s singing the Franklin Academy blues

Where nonverbal learning disabilities are

Overcome and everyone heads off to college

He’s singing the five Quint two Intercession blues

The transitions that could not be made

The dreaded summonses

I give you the no-mercy rule

The let’s-get-thrown-out-of-school-

And-hire-tutors-to-graduate-from-home blues

He’s singing the Dubspot blues

The fantasy of Reason and Record

The electronic-music-has-died blues

There are no more academies to attend

He was not befriended by study

A therapist called him one of the lost boys

For his eighteenth birthday

As a special present to himself

He took himself off all medications

All those drug regimens for tics and tantrums

For disorders that were being named

By the month and year

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Mood disorder

Oppositional-defiant disorder

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Combined type and bipolar disorder

Mixed type also dyslexia dysgraphia

For a while we were on the Autism spectrum

But then PDD-NOS was dropped

As a diagnosis for the new manual

All those special cocktails

All those weekly appointments

And adjustments by the doctors

Someone had to keep track

Of the side effects of taking clonidine

Adderall Depakote Ritalin

Strattera Abilify Concerta

Levoxyl Paxil and Trileptal

In the morning and at bedtime

Risperdal the special culprit

I fought against and lost

The argument lasted for years

He hated the way it puffed his face

And ballooned his body sixty pounds

He pleaded for drug holidays

The evening with its lamps burning

The night with its head in its hands

The early morning

I look back at the worried parents

Wandering through the house

What are we going to do

The evening of the clinical

The night of the psychological

The morning facedown in the pillow

The experts can handle him

The experts have no idea

How to handle him

There are enigmas in darkness

There are mysteries

Sent out without searchlights

The stars are hiding tonight

The moon is cold and stony

Behind the clouds

Nights without seeing

Mornings of the long view

It’s not a sprint but a marathon

Whatever we can do

We must do

Every morning’s resolve

But sometimes we suspected

He was being punished

For something obscure we had done

I would never abandon the puzzle

Sleeping in the next room

But I could not solve it

Fatherhood could not be conquered

My friend Donald concluded

It could be
turned down
in his generation

I dialed it down and let Janet deal

With the medical doctors the various

Specialists who plagued us with help

The psychologists the psychiatrists

The neuropsychiatrists the speech therapists

The art therapists the occupational therapists

Have I left anyone out what about

The head of the Movement Disorders Center

Who told us he had two thousand patients

In the seventies I was one of the fools

Who took the side of nurture versus nature

I thought sociobiology was a crock

Think of the brain as a switchboard

Dr. B. said stiffly

He has a lot of things knocked out

I didn’t want to I couldn’t help it

I pictured a system of circuits misfiring

Wires crossed and darkened

He is going to continue to develop

All through his twenties
he explained

He’s going to be thirty before you know

It was good news it was hopeful

But it made me think of the celebration

When everyone jammed into the dining room

For the giant cake with my picture on it

And I watched all my friends

Eating pieces of my face

And the Father the Law

Who should have been handing down

Commandments from on high

What was he doing all those years

When he should have been reassuring his wife

And taking charge of his son

What was he doing when he should have been

Standing fast and overruling the experts

Who were guessing what to do

He should have been teaching him

Character teaching him values teaching him

To become the man he was meant to become

What was he doing the Father the Law

In the exact middle of life

But fighting for his vocation

Ghost of my earlier self

I see you muttering to yourself

And pacing up and down

In a room on the second floor

Of the house all night every night

Through your late forties

What were you seeking but escape

The transport and the despondency

Of the old makers

Poet who labored so hard at your craft

On a scarred wooden desk

It is late now

It is time

To turn off the lamp

And come down from your study

After we moved to New York

I asked him if he was lonely at school

And he said
I’m used to it Dad

He wanted to come home to the city

With attention deficit disorder