When he can’t get to sleep in such dark
he gazes at where he knows the backyard
ends in a clump of wisteria – there lies

his secret, there he can shelter from his room
and pretend to escape from the pain
and pretend that he isn’t trembling in the night.

And he does tremble, if not every night
then at least when the inflexions of the dark
and the hissed whispers and the pain

cause him for moments to forget the yard
and listen again to the echoes that the room
so magnifies and all those ceaseless lies.

At school of course everybody lies
but brazenly, not in whispers like the night
or the bittersweet aloneness of the room

or the limpid coruscations of the dark –
it is different in the bazaar of the schoolyard
where shouts conceal the words for pain.

The wisteria grove is his refuge, no pain
can reach him there, and all the lies
melt away in that magical backyard

corner he stares into from the heart of night
where he can tangle himself inside a dark
of stubborn branches, and there is always room

for the honey of silence inside and room
for the shedding of his fear and his pain
and in those shadows he is sheltered from dark

as he sits entwined in the wisteria or he lies
prone and nuzzles to the grass until night
is ready to descend and he must leave the yard.

Must return to his room, where he lies
in his five-year-old pain waiting for night
to end and for dark to give back his backyard.