Where The Fountains Run Dry

The places and children we leave behind.

We stopped upon a market lot,
with row upon row
of wooden heads,
skewered ten by six.

From African lands, now a distant clime,
of witch doctor descent,
our children played pick-up sticks—

iChing, Spillikins, Mikado,
Haida-adorned Abalone.

Down we wandered
through green ascensions,
the city’s forgotten veins—pulsated.
A gentrified railway—truncated.

We navigated archways
where bespectacled boys
ghosted imaginary fountains,
never to come back.

The burning of the clocks—
where time stopped,
with its tick and its tock.
We mourned those boys in vacant lots.
Mother Teresa and Gandhi scaffold crumbling walls.
Jewish mothers hear Shabbat calls.
In Arab lands, the Ezan instead—
a call to the wise, to the lovers, to the dead.

The roots of all good families
branch out and stretch,
with speckled leaves
and outlandish far-fetch.

With time, all parents know:
their existence—threadbare, thinned,
unspooling, folding inward,
horizons swallow their names.

There’s a man I once knew,
wise as he was flawed,
living his life with open
and closed doors.

At windows in summer,
he would recite maddening words:
"It’s messy until it isn’t,
and that’s why we must reverse."

He swept his musings under faded rugs,
a pocket watch,
swaying side to side,
yelling at old women and passersby—
a quickening in an otherwise slow-moving world.

His tired old mother,
tender and proud,
purposefully
let him slip by.

The market now empty,
the clocks comply.
All things end
where the fountains run dry.

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