Boy with Thunderfoils

by Michael Lavers

He comes, straight from the stables every day,
over the bridge, joining the others walking
winter’s blue-mud lanes, slow trickles pooling 
at the gates into a crowd. He crosses through 
the yard toward the stage, then goes behind the stage. 
A flourish, and a hush, and then he sits. He waits, 
motionless, holding the steel tongue of the sky, 
muting its cold sharp-edged soliloquy. Peeking, 
he sees three thousand faces focused on one thing, 
a single action, or a phrase, what’s on the stage, 
but spilling off, over the whole vast scale of the seen. 
He sees the grief of those whose lives are words.
He sees, sitting beside him on the ground, the playwright, 
chin in hand, drawing in dirt, mouthing the lines. 
Soon he can tell: his moment’s close, a charge 
brooding the air. And there appears, small, like the slit 
of a cracked door, glowing in the distance, in the far 
crescendos of grief’s song, an opening, a call to shout, 
to play, to somehow join the litany, so when the king 
at last steps out, screaming and naked, and the boy’s 
whole body shakes, the sound that comes comes from 
within, some faint interior refrain, the pain of his ten years 
refracted through these blended gutturals of fire and steel, 
the shook-out sound of heaven, of his self, lamenting 
his young life, foiling a king, whipping creation into doom. 
A noise of keen delirium, of faithless air, making 
the older boys, dressed up as daughters, flinch. 
He shakes, and grown men wail. He quivers, 
and the whole globe swoons. Then he collapses, 
sweating, hearing nothing, silence and its sweet threat 
stopping up his ears. And then at last, slow baffled sobs. 
He breathes. He stands. Exeunt, then home, over the bridge, 
past dogs and men sleeping in mud, afraid of nothing 
but himself now, of the thing inside of him no king commands, 
some mad god buzzing in his bones, a still awed listening, 
faint sobbing everywhere, for all time, without end, 
poured out of air, landing on everything.

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