Mark Terry, “Son of Adam,” Tin Man Series, 19 x 19 x 6, mixed media
What’s Wrong
(after Plath’s For a Fatherless Son)
One day you may touch what’s wrong/ The small
skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush
Surely, some professor’s tenure rests on what
Plath meant by this, footnotes and addenda.
I do not, only the wrongness you would touch
in me would you go looking, not hushed, but noisy,
grating as PSYOPs speakers, endlessly looping,
no small skulls, but my own, vise-clamped,
bitterness wrenching ratchets, no blue hills,
but a treadmill’s worn path around a millstone
and the rasp of its grim grinding. But right now
you are dumb. As are two pressed on opposite
sides of prison glass, fingertip to fingertip,
phone dangling, disconnected, or farther still,
on this and that side of death, the dumb mound,
the silent headstone, the urn. You cannot imagine
what it’s like in here, and I cannot help you.
You will be aware of an absence, presently
________________
Devon Balwit