Hospitalers

"Will you write something for me

where something nice happens?" the boy asks me.

"Something nice?"

He nods. "Everything you write is so serious."

He is ten years old, the son of a dear friend

who is a terrible parent. He comes to my house

very often, has for years, and does his

homework or reads books while I sit writing.

Sometimes I read to him what I have written, 

sometimes he reads it on his own.

He's asked me what a clit was, because he read it

in something I wrote, what a speedball is.

We are unlikely friends, a grown man and

a precocious boy; if we go out - I often

take him with me when I don't feel like 

cooking - we are always taken for 

father and son. We favor each other, 

as the ladies used to say. 

His father is one of two people

who has literally saved my life, 

but is now on his own downward

trajectory, he is a human Skylab.

I see the boy very often lately.

"Serious?"

"It's always drugs or weird girl problems."

He is not wrong.

"Something nice then?"

And he nods his golden-brown head.

At the very least, this child 

should have that.

You deserve better, I almost say,

but it would be a betrayal of our

unspoken agreement never to mention

why he comes here, why we are friends,

why I am even alive.

He comes and looks over my shoulder

at the poem I am about to delete.

" 'Country and Western'?" he asks.

"It's only a title," I say, my finger hovering.

"Is it about music?" I shake my head.

He says again, "Write something nice for me,"

and trundles off to the bathroom.

A boy and a girl sit on the edge of a dock, dangling their feet into the warm waters of

a Minnesota lake, watching the summer sun disappear behind tall pine trees. They have only known each other for a few hours, and already the boy's arm is curlicues and swirls and whorls, painted in henna by the steady hand of the girl. His chest, his back are decorated too, and as she had painted him, she had told him the designs she was making, what they meant and symbolized.

And why those, he asked, pointing to a slithering vine-like line going up his side, and the girl smiled and tucked her tongue in the corner of her mouth to paint the leaves just so, and finally said, A vine is strong and tenacious.

And this? he asked, pointing to the cattail going up the underside of his left arm. A reed is supple and bends when it is wise to bend.

She tucks her blond hair behind her ear and tells him to lower himself into the water. He does, and when he comes out the henna is like filigree etched into his skin. He is breathless at the loveliness she has made upon him, and he looks at her, in wonder, 

and says 

The boy is back from wherever he has been

and is reading over my shoulder again.

I can feel beside me his warmth and smell

a scent of peanut butter. "What does the boy 

say", he asks, looking up at me,

his eyes clear and unveiled, as if seeing 

at last through a dense and frightening

fog. "He says, 'I don't deserve this'."

And I put my arm around the boy 

I have no right to deserve

and he says, "Finally."